The YouTube rabbit holes of hyper-obscure documentaries and video essays about the subsection of a subsection of your favorite type of cereal more often than not lie adjacent to the tutorials your favorite instrumentalists and producers credit as the catalyst for their creative beginnings. Take Michael Davie, better known by his pseudonym greek, for example, whose internet obsessions and draw towards an addictive sound would ultimately yield an exceptionally sharp ear for hit-making. From his early Southern-Virginia upbringing, greek filled his spare time poking through FL Studio and YouTube on the ever-convenient Kindle Fire, taking note of the tips and tidbits involved in procuring danceable and, for lack of a better term, lit arrangements.

The anatomy of Davie’s journey was presented to me with an extremely refreshing candor. Through our chat, he unpacks the subtle (albeit crucial) art of navigating creative dynamics with bigger collaborators, and how Bowie-esque funk served as the driver for early singles off his latest EP “DANCE BREAK.”

I caught up with greek in between Toronto shows at the tail end of his tour, discussing his artist evolution, the power of internet-provided ingenuity, and the collaborative risks that continue to shape projects to come. Don’t miss this one!

25F: You had a sort of “YouTube University” beginning where you were going in and making music on a Kindle Fire. When I’m trying to learn something new, even non-creative things, I always end up falling down rabbit holes. Was there a specific rabbit hole you fell down when learning the early stages of music, or a core video you remember watching that permanently shaped how you create?

greek: I think a lot of it came down to a couple of YouTubers I was watching as a late teenager who really helped me. Surprisingly, there were way more informational videos online about FL Studio and music production than I expected, and they were much more inviting. They were YouTubers I actually would have watched for entertainment even if it wasn’t specifically about music.

I remember—this is less about the technical pipeline—getting really into Kenny Beats’ livestreams around COVID. That was big for me. I also watched a couple of guitar YouTubers, but there was one user named Simon Servida who made FL Studio content. I was kind of obsessed with him early on because he posted general informational videos about FL Studio, which is what I produce in. That was my main source of learning for a couple of months.

As you moved into FL Studio and started messing around with it, did you have a big “oh shit, you can do that?” moment while poking around that you still use when creating music today?

There were definitely some moments. The first song I ever made that felt like a “holy shit” moment—where I realized I might actually have a future in this—was a song called “It Means the Most.” That’s the first song I have out on streaming services to this day.

I have a lot of songs that were uploaded, taken down, reuploaded, and taken down again. Even my current biggest song, “hmu,” was a song I made in early 2021, right after my pure, obsessive phase with production. I knew I had something special with that one. I had a eureka moment where I figured out a certain blend in the sounds I was going for.

That’s actually the reason it came out on EXTC later—I took it down from streaming services a few times, but I knew there would be a moment where it would feel extra special for people who were just discovering it.

Speaking of “EXTC,” and tracks like “Safety” and “hmu”—when it comes to track arrangement specifically, were there any hard lessons you had to teach yourself while building your debut projects?

Early on, people in my life would occasionally mention my peculiar song arrangement choices. I had a knack for beat switches much more consistently than I do now. That was something I had to work through because I get bored of songs and sounds really easily. I was so excited about making music, but arrangement was something that had to be honed over time.

Take a song like “hmu”—there are two distinct halves to it. Funny enough, when I finished the first half, it was the first song I ever made where I started crying while making it.

In a good way or a bad way?

In a good way! I don’t think I’ve ever cried in a bad way while making music. I finished the first half of “hmu,” and I really liked it, but this was around 2021, and I didn’t fully know what kind of music I wanted to make yet. I assumed I would inevitably land in more of an indie genre space—like Mac DeMarco-type, slower-building stuff. I finished the track and thought, “This sounds a little too much like a pop song.”

One time, a friend of mine came over and talked some sense into me. He was like, “Bro, this is an insanely cool song, you shouldn’t throw this away.” I sat with it for a couple of days, and then randomly made a beat that fit perfectly as a second half. I was sitting in my room at my parents’ house in my hometown recording vocals to it, and I realized I had unintentionally used the same melody line as the first half.

When I realized it was this perfect puzzle piece fitting together, I got overwhelmed with emotion. I have no formal music background; my entry into music was a very late-2010s, internet-and-YouTube path. To finally discover a song that connected all the dots I had been reaching for was overwhelming in a good way. That was the first time I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is actually turning into something.”

In those early stages of developing your sound, when you hit creative ruts, did you feel like you were under-producing, over-producing, or just hitting a wall where you didn’t know whether to upgrade or minimize?

Back then, I was so obsessed with the concept of getting better at music and refining my craft. As negative as COVID was, it allowed me the time to work on my craft non-stop. It felt like an opportunity to focus on everything I knew I was capable of doing, which I hadn’t had time for before because of school. I had just graduated high school when it happened, and I was just completely consumed by it.

During COVID, were you doing any collaborative production, or was it entirely solo work before you started producing for other artists later on?

It was almost entirely after, because pre-2021, I was living in my hometown in southern Virginia. I adore the place—I live in Los Angeles now, but I go home a lot—but at the time, I didn’t have any opportunities available to collaborate with people outside of local friends.

That lack of accessibility was actually a big driver for me. I really wanted to make music and express myself, but I felt limited because where I lived didn’t have an entertainment infrastructure. That’s why the internet was so vital for me.

Collaborating didn’t really start until late 2021 when I moved to North Carolina. I met some people down there who were in a band, and then met a whole group of people making music. I’m very grateful for that time; it helped me understand that there were so many people my age doing inspiring things who could push me forward just by being around them.

Moving from working with local friends to producing for massive names must have been a shift. As you collaborate with other artists, do you find your brain has to switch gears between making a beat tailored for someone else versus for yourself? Do you hold certain ideas back for your own project, or do you just reflect what the other artist asks for?

I had to learn how to navigate that. When I was younger, I had a complex where I always assumed I was the least knowledgeable person in the room and needed to defer to others rather than lead by example.

When I started working with my manager, he introduced me to clients he was managing, and I started doing sessions. At first, I would walk into rooms, accept whatever the setup was, and just try my best. But everyone is just trying to make cool music and have a good time. I learned that if you’re the designated producer in the room, it’s very important for you to step up and guide things, unless the artist is extremely vocal about what they want.

My favorite collaborative experiences are when it’s truly a joint effort—where everyone is completely involved in the process, rather than me just making a beat while someone waits to write a verse. I love when someone is vocal about what they’re looking for and fully invested. The camaraderie of that is really special.

Making music started with me alone or with a couple of friends just messing around. When it becomes more serious, and there are egos or new dynamics in the room, it’s a new challenge. It took some time to adapt, but I’ve learned how to navigate it over the years.

Malleability is so key in collaboration—having a mutual conversation where both people reflect each other’s artistry.

I wanted to transition to the new record. I saw a comparison between “HOLD ME” and David Bowie’s “Fame,” which I thought was awesome. Bowie’s sound has a very specific, effortlessly cool funk groove. When you were making that track, were you listening to “Fame” repeatedly to figure out how to make that feel your own, or was it more of an intuitive translation?

Over the last six months to a year, I’ve gotten pretty obsessive about certain artists, but Bowie wasn’t someone I was constantly listening to at the time.

About a year ago, I made the instrumental for “HOLD ME” at home. I did a rough vocal and instantly felt the groove. I credit a lot of that to the sample we used by a group called Airwaves. In the sample, there’s this stab on every other beat—I think it’s a Wurlitzer—that created such a beautiful pocket for the drums to sit in. Once I laid down my bassline and played on top of it, everything clicked.

Throughout this year, I’ve been listening to a lot of Michael McDonald, The Doobie Brothers, and Michael Jackson, which subtly bleed into the project’s sound. But sampling has always been the backbone of my music. For “HOLD ME,” the sample was a massive component, and it helped craft a groove that feels really special.

On “HOLD ME,” the vocal delivery is so rhythmic that it almost acts like a percussion element over the beat. Was that intentional, and was it difficult to write the lyrics so every word hit right on the pocket?

I consider myself a producer first. By that, I mean when I’m making a song, I base almost everything on feeling. A good producer knows how to make a song feel good.

With a song like “HOLD ME,” fitting into that rhythmic pocket happens naturally during the writing process because the goal of the song is to make you feel that groove. Compare that to older tracks of mine like “STRANGER” from “ACCELERATOR,” where I just sat on my bed with an acoustic guitar, wrote a song, and then brought it to my computer to structure it. “HOLD ME” was aiming for a completely different energy, so sitting right inside the pocket of the beat was essential.

When you take that intentional energy to a live setting, do you get new perspectives from fans? I’ve read that you like to hang out with fans after your shows. Do they read the songs the way you intended, or do they bring surprising interpretations?

I don’t often have open conversations about my process publicly, so I’m always pleasantly surprised by how on-the-mark people are when they talk to me after shows.

I talk about production and details I love in music a lot, and I think the people who become fans really tune into that. At shows, a good portion of the crowd will ask me technical questions about the writing or production process and what made a track click for them.

I’ve played hundreds of shows, and with the exception of one time when I had a fever, I’ve stayed after every single headline show to meet everyone who stuck around. I’ve talked to so many people over the years, and I’m always impressed by how insightful their questions are.

Visually, you’ve had a clear evolution alongside your sound. How has your style, stage presence, or overall presentation evolved across these different project eras?

People naturally love following an artist’s visual and stylistic evolution. When an artist successfully pulls off a major stylistic shift, it’s the coolest thing ever, and it often becomes a defining arc in their career.

I’m in an interesting place right now. I’ve put out two albums and a mixtape, and I’m always looking forward to the next thing. The last few years were about proving to myself that I could make cohesive albums that stand the test of time.

After dropping “ACCELERATOR”, I released “CEDARS TAPE,” which completely shifted my perspective on what I wanted to do with my live show. “DANCE BREAK” was almost me re-establishing that mindset as I transition into the next chapter. I consider this whole period a strong transitional era where I’m reshaping things before dropping the next record.

How early in the process do you start visualizing the artwork, colors, or music videos for a project?

It varies, but I’m getting better at conceptualizing early on. For “EXTC,” I worked on the art direction with my friend Angel. We explored a lot of oversaturated, over-the-top visuals.

The cover image for “EXTC” was actually shot by another friend back home and sat on my hard drive for a year. I couldn’t figure out the right cover, but when I stumbled back onto that photo, it gave me the exact visual direction I needed. I had been playing with that high-saturation visual style for years.

With “ACCELERATOR,” I took a 180-degree turn because the songs were less about pure feeling and had more personal substance. With “CEDARS TAPE,” I pushed that further. Moving into the next record, I plan to sit down and take my time with the visual world. As a project develops, certain films, photos, or videos just stick with me and end up defining the artistic direction.

You mentioned “DANCE BREAK” being a major transitional period. What is a risk you’re taking with your upcoming full-length project that you wouldn’t have dared to try earlier in your career?

Like a lot of people, I’m a creature of habit. For the last five years, I made 85% of my music completely by myself in my bedroom. I want to stop doing that.

The beauty of music often comes from capturing a moment between people in the same room and seeing how their identities mesh. “DANCE BREAK” was a step away from my old habit. In a short amount of time, I took my demos to a friend, Charlie Damski, and we worked on them together at his studio using a completely different setup.

That might sound simple, but for me, relinquishing that level of control was a huge step out of my comfort zone. Over the past year, I’ve been influenced by so much music that I haven’t yet incorporated into my released work. The new stuff I’m working on is in its early stages, but the biggest leap for me is embracing collaboration and opening myself up to new processes.

Listen to “DANCE BREAK” on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow greek on Instagram.

Patrick Shiroishi speaks with the easy clarity of someone who has spent years translating internal noise into physical sound because he has been doing exactly that since the beginning. Sitting down with the multi-instrumentalist ahead of his appearance at Sound and Gravity in Chicago, our conversation moves with the same unfiltered logic that informs his work: passionate, fluid, and unbelievably intentional. On stage, his music exists as a vessel for processing emotions both from the time of their conception and in that present moment with a crowd of eyes on him and his saxophone.

Our chat charts the terrain of his recent output, tracing the shift from deeply personal family histories to recent collaborations. Shiroishi opens up about the emotional residue built into his upcoming duo project with Jason Nazary, which is a raw, instinctual memorial for their late friend and multi-instrumentalist Jaimie Branch, and how embracing first-take intuition has allowed space for shared mourning.

As he prepares to step away from the stage for a period of rest, Shiroishi and I had a very nice conversation reflecting on the quiet, radical transition from creating and performing nonstop to the impending excitement of fatherhood.

We had a lovely conversation, and I hope you take a read!

25F: I want to talk about the upcoming project you have with Jason Nazary, “Here I Am, No I.” I’m really excited about all that stuff. How did conceptualizing it as a tribute to the late Jaimie Branch shape both the physical and sonic energy that you both brought into the recording room?

Patrick Shiroishi: Yeah. I think music for me, over the past however long I’ve been doing it, has always been a way of processing what I’m going through at that moment. A lot of my solo stuff—since I’m allowed to be pretty selfish—comes from personal events. The first tape I did was about my grandma passing away. The next thing was about my grandpa in Japan passing away. Then I was exploring and learning about what my family went through in the internment camps during World War II, which became a huge focus.

Family investigation was really prominent in what I was exploring, and I’m grateful that I was able to connect with different people in different mediums to have conversations about that—other Japanese Americans that I wasn’t necessarily familiar with in town. It’s one of the beauties of the internet.

Totally.

I feel like a lot of stuff I was doing before was very micro, and Forgetting Is Violent, my latest solo project, was very macro in a sense.

I think Jason is one of the most underrated drummers. His group Little Women with Darius Jones, Travis Laplante, and Andrew Smiley—their album Throat really fucked me up. That was my favorite record of that year. Everything they did was just so precise, emotional, and on point with the horns.

Being on the West Coast while he was on the East Coast, just hearing little snippets of the records he was on, I was always like, “Damn, this guy is fucking insane.” On one of my first trips over to New York, I recorded a session with him and Wendy Eisenberg. I would go see him play whenever I was in town.

Right after Jaimie passed, I started recording a little something and sent it to Jason. I said, “Hey, if you want to try and do something, we can.” I don’t know if we had talked about doing a project before then, but I sent those tracks over, and I think that was the first thing he recorded on with another person after Jaimie had passed. It was coming from a very emotional place for him. They were in a band together, close collaborators, and friends. I'm glad he felt like it was a safe place for him to dive into his feelings of losing a close friend and collaborator

How do you feel like your relationship with intuition changes when you’re in the studio making a project like this without a strict roadmap, versus your solo projects that might have a more multi-layered arrangement and an itinerary of sorts beforehand?

That’s a good question. It depends on the amount of time I have to prepare before going into something. With some of my solo stuff, I get to sit with it for a long time. Not to say that I don’t apply that same time to other projects, but sometimes the first thought or the first take is the best thing. There’s no filter. That has happened a lot with takes I’ve done for friends’ records. You do Take 1, then Take 2 and 3, but Take 1 always has something special. You’re still figuring it out in the room, trying stuff, just going for it, and there’s something raw in that first instance.

I’m curious about the development of your concepts not only in music but in poetry and improv. Does the concept come before producing, does the production come first, or is it just whatever feels best in the moment?

For me, in the past, it has been concept first. Then I figure out what the ideas and melodies are going to be and flesh those out.

When it comes to production, I’m a pretty budget-conscious guy, so going into a commercial studio gives me anxiety—like, “Oh my god, I have to make the absolute most of my time.” I’m grateful for home studio setups where I can lay down ideas and overdub, or use spaces where I can be loud. But it’s mostly concept first.

With poetry, it’s a little different. Because I’m still new to it, I’m having to develop as I go. There are a lot of edits. It has been a different way of working, which has been really exciting and fun for me.

When you have those fragmented processes and finally get to the final product, how do you take those finished pieces and translate them into a setlist for a live performance?

For live performances, I’ve been developing a core solo set over a few years. But there are instances where it changes. When I went on tour opening for Sumac—which is a pretty heavy metal audience—that set was very different than when I opened for Emma Ruth Rundle on her acoustic tour, which was just piano, voice, and guitar.

I like the idea of challenging the listener, but I also consider the context. I crafted both of those sets to figure out how I could stay true to myself while appealing to the audience and bringing them into my world. A solo saxophone set at a metal show—I had to figure out how to make that work.

Do you have a physical or mental warm-up process before going on stage to demand the audience’s attention?

I try not to get my heart rate too high; that’s been a big focus over the past few years. In the past, I did a lot of drinking before performing, which helped cut out excess thoughts. But as I’ve gotten older and toured more, I realized that’s not a functional way to operate.

I’ve played to many different audiences now and been around long enough that if the listener knows who I am, they’re willing to give me a chance. For me, it’s not about pleading with people to listen for 30 minutes. It’s more like: “This is what I’m presenting. This is the music. If you want to vibe with this, awesome. If not, that’s okay, too.”

Do variables like festivals versus intimate headlining/opening shows add a layer of unpredictability to your sets?

It depends on whether I’m doing through-composed material or free improvisation, and who I’m playing with. For the Sound and Gravity festival, I’m doing a solo set, but I’m also playing in Chris Williams’ Vibrations Trio, which is great. We have a roadmap for the trio material with structured places to freely improvise, and everyone in that band is incredible.

My solo set is something I’ve played a good amount of times, so I feel comfortable with it. I know where I can stretch out, improvise, and be in the moment.

Amidst all of this touring, you’re about to have a child! Congrats on that. Have you noticed a shift in how you think about music, time, pacing, and your creative process?

Time feels much more fluid now. We’re getting really close to the due date, which is September 21st. We had a bunch of housework to do, getting the nursery together, and fitting all of that in between playing these last few shows. Sound and Gravity is going to be my third-to-last show before the baby is born—assuming he doesn’t come early!

At shows now, I’m trying to connect with fans and people who came out. I’m much more aware of all of that as the date approaches. Once the baby comes, it’s going to be incredible, and I’m not even going to be thinking about music for a bit. Before, I thought, “I have to record a whole record before this baby comes,” and I haven’t even started!

Does the prospect of parenthood change how you think about the musical legacy you’re leaving behind? Or is the focus on the present so strong that you don’t have time to consider that?

It’s going to be a day-by-day thing. I can only anticipate what it’s going to be like when our child arrives, but in reality, I have no idea—which is both exciting and scary.

I’ve put in a lot of work over the years releasing solo records, collaborating, and guesting on tracks. Up until last year, I put out a solo record every single year. This year, life got in the way a bit. Part of me felt like I was failing my own expectations, but I’m at a place where what I’m trying to say is shifting. I don’t want to force out any music under my own name that doesn’t have deep meaning; releasing something half-assed would be trash, especially when so much amazing music is coming out right now. This is a period where I am shifting physically, mentally, and sonically, and we’ll see what comes out of it.

Does that prospect make you more excited about future creation, or are you just at peace with stepping away from it for a moment to be with your family?

Being at peace is a great phrase for it. I play out constantly, and that lifestyle became so normalized for me. Taking three months off at the end of the year without playing a single show—that used to sound crazy. But once our kid is here, that won’t even be on my mind. I’m just going to want to stay home and be with him.

So excited for you. Into more theoreticals now: if you could take either your solo work or a duo project and perform at any physical location on Earth—no logistics, acoustics, or constraints to worry about—where would it be?

Ooh! I really want to play in Iceland; I think that would be sick. If we didn’t have to worry about anything, maybe playing inside the Blue Lagoon!

Would that be a solo set or a group effort?

I would do a solo set first, and then a large ensemble performance right after!

Outside of experimental or saxophone-focused jazz, is there a genre or musical style you’re loving right now that helps you turn your brain off?

Right now, I’m listening to a lot of City Pop. A lot of great music has been coming out from friends on the scene, too. I’ve also been listening to ambient music and nostalgia records turning 20 years old, which is cool.

There’s so much imaginative music coming out from peers that pushes boundaries. When I listen to it, I catch myself thinking, “How can I incorporate that into my own work?” But in the back of my mind, I’m also worrying, “If I play this live by myself, how am I going to recreate it?” That mindset can be a hindrance. There’s beauty in simplicity, but I’m also a huge fan of maximalism—whether in tone or complexity. I think I just need to focus on writing the music first, without worrying about how to perform it live, and figure that out later.

What do you hope someone who has never heard your music or seen you live takes away from your solo set at Sound and Gravity?

I hope they can dig into themselves. My solo set is a reflection of things I’ve gone through—a lot of it hard. There are field recordings and samples from specific events in my life, but my hope is that it can resonate with something the listener has gone through, giving them space to sit with those feelings.

What is one thing outside of music right now that is bringing you genuine joy?

Obviously, getting our home ready for our kid, and feeling my partner’s stomach and feeling him move around during the day and before we go to sleep—that’s really wild.

In terms of art, the world of poetry has been incredible. I’m coming at it as a newcomer, so I’m mostly reading modern writers. My knowledge of historical poetry is pretty trash!

Me too.

Just reading these people’s takes on their lives and experiences, put down on the page so beautifully... words are hard! For writers to tell their stories like that is so fucking cool.

In the past, I would read a poetry collection once and move on, as I do with prose books. But when I toured with Emma Ruth Rundle, she taught me a different approach: she brings one collection on tour and rereads it over and over. I started doing that, and finding new things each time I go through the words on the page has been really enlightening. Just sitting with those collections repeatedly has brought me a lot of joy.

Poetry feels like a continuous growth process upon re-reading, whereas with recorded music, after hearing it so many times during production, you can lose that initial spark and start to go a little crazy.

Yeah, I try my best to do an intentional first listen with new music. If I’m really hyped for an album, I won’t even listen to the advance singles. I want the first experience to be sitting in my living room with headphones or on the stereo and just zoning in completely. I loved doing that as a kid—getting absorbed in that world. It’s still one of the coolest things ever.

Listen to “Forgetting is Violent” on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp. Listen to Shiroishi’s collaborative project with Jason Nazary, “here i am no i,” out September 18.

Follow Patrick Shiroishi on Instagram.

On a postcard-perch overlooking the ripples of Lake Como, Noah Hill sits in the strange, thrilling vertigo of striking out completely solo. Best known as a bass-thumping pillar of Australian indie-pop juggernaut Parcels, Hill has traded the safety of five-way creative democracy for a solo narrative that is his and his alone. This space was born out of necessity: a place to unearth vintage folk melodies, dormant pop demos, and raw acoustic transparency that is tough to reckon with in a group of five.

Rooted in a chaotic, decades-long romance marked by cinematic (albeit heartbreaking) airport goodbyes, the “Ok ok now” exchanges grand poetic posturing for startling, unglamorous vulnerability. Pairing the stripped-down intimacy of Joni Mitchell and Adrianne Lenker with pristine, modern pop vocal processing, it is an album crafted for late-in-the-day listens over stiff glasses of wine.

In our chat, Hill opens up about standing under the spotlight alone, processing grief as a public artifact, and finding the quiet, hopeful courage to pull yourself out of the wreckage.

We had a fantastic chat that you absolutely don’t want to miss!

25F: Where are you calling in from?

Noah Hill: I’m sitting on a little perch looking over Lake Como right now.

That sounds pretty awesome. What time is it there?

4 PM.

Okay, cool. I hope I didn’t get you too early or too late.

No, no, you’re good.

Well, I wanted to start, obviously, talking about your new, exciting solo career after a pretty awesome band career to date with Parcels. What was the initial sensation of having no one to check in with and taking complete executive authority over the music that you’re making?

Yeah, at first it was so what I needed and what I was inspired by. That’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to do this—just to do something on my own, check in with no one, create exactly what I wanted to do, and bounce off nobody except myself. I didn’t show anyone the music until right at the end. I gave no one any insight into what it was going to be.

Then, I entered a new phase where I was like, wow, that’s actually really intense to have nobody else to bounce my work off of, and I started feeling a little overwhelmed.

I got a newfound respect for the band through it as well and realized how good it is to have other people to show things to. Creating stuff is so weird and difficult sometimes, and it’s hard to know what the best way is. You’ve just got to keep going, keep making, and stay inspired by whatever motivates you to do the next thing.

Do you feel like the turn into a solo career was driven by an absence of something within the band?

Yeah, there’s just a certain amount of space that operates in a band of five super creative, opinionated people. I don’t think there’s enough room for any of us truly to be 100% creatively fulfilled in it, because we’ve all got our own identities and our own desires. We all want to express something for ourselves, and you end up compromising in some way for the betterment of making everyone feel good, supported, and a part of it.

I lost stuff inside of the band—creative control, creative output, songs that I loved that never got finished. I can say the same for the other guys in the band as well. I know it’s the same; we talk about it a lot. There are just songs that don’t get finished because there are too many songs and too many members who are writing great music.

I think we’re all turning to solo work in a way where we’re going, “Hey, we should have this really free place in which we can express ourselves more purely.” Then the band is a place for collaborating and finding out what works best for everybody. That’s the magic of the band, and what people love about it. But I needed to go beyond that to experiment for myself.

Does performing solo feel like an itch being scratched—where you’re like, “Finally I get to do this on my own on stage”—or is it a little weird and crazy with a lot more eyes on you specifically that you still need to adjust to?

A mixture of both. When we were growing up as teenagers, some of us used to play in a folk band—like a trio thing. A lot of it was my songs, with me playing guitar. So I had experienced what it felt like to be the guy playing guitar and singing his own songs in that sort of way.

I wanted to explore that feeling I had as a kid, which had sort of stopped when we started playing in Parcels because I was just the bass player and one of the songwriters. I was like, “Oh, I want to try that feeling again.”

I was more nervous for the first solo show than for any Parcels show, by far—feeling the weight of responsibility with all eyes on me. But it’s a good level. Getting outside of your comfort zone is really important, and that’s what I’m doing. It’s like: “Okay, I’m doing this thing. It’s really scary, I’m trying my best, and everyone’s looking at me.”

I know how to play shows—I’ve played so many shows to so many people—but I haven’t done this specific thing, which is playing my own soft, vulnerable songs on guitar. That’s exhilarating, scary, and what we should all strive to do in life: do the scary thing that you want to do.

Were all of these songs relatively recent, or were they a combination of much older songs that you were writing while still in Parcels?

Yeah, some of them are even songs that I pitched to the band at some point. I would show the guys, and maybe we’d even play one or two of them, or there was talk of doing them as the band, but it just never happened—which is very normal. Other ones were never really band songs; they were pop songs or folk songs that I had written on my own many years ago that were just aesthetically different from the band.

How did those older songs evolve when you revisited them after years of touring with the band and giving them space to return?

Some of them didn’t change that much at all. Tracks like “Sympathizing” or “Brighten Your Mind,” I remember leaving for a while, and when I came back, I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to mess with this too much.” If I started overproducing things, I realized I was losing a lot of the essence of what they were from the start.

Originally, “Like You Do” was an ‘80s pop thing that I had given to the band at some stage. There had been some interest in trying it as a song, but as the record moved, it just didn’t happen. A year or two later, I came back to it and started playing it on the guitar again. Sometimes you realize a song has legs just on a guitar; you sing it, feel it, and find a new emotional place for it.

“Heaven” was a bit like that too. I made a thing on a laptop leaning into a Parcels sound—a dance/disco thing that I was imagining as part of a Parcels record. Then I started playing it really stripped-back on a guitar and realized there was actually a cool song in there if you took all the production away.

On first listen, not only with the production, but with the story, the record has a nonlinear, fragmented nature to it. I feel like there’s a time and place for a linear concept; here it works nicely. It’s distinctly human, if that makes any sense. Why did that nonlinear structure feel like a more truthful way to tell this big story?

Because the relationship that it’s about was so fragmented. The person the whole record is about is someone I’ve known since I was six years old—we went to primary school together. But we only got together at 20, and then we would break up and get back together. I would be living overseas, she’d be living in Australia... trying to keep a relationship going while you’re in a touring band on the other side of the world always felt fragmented and intense. Intense together, and intense apart.

It never had that traditional linear progression: you meet someone, get together, deepen your relationship, find out it doesn’t work, and then it’s over. It was a total mess of love and chaos, tearful departures at airports, three months or a year of living together, and then chaos. So, the record reflects that in lots of ways.

Listening to a song like “Bye Baby,” you have this sort of gentle resignation which feels like a motif in the record. How hard is it to capture such an unglamorous stage of grief? You know it firsthand, but conveying it to other people in the right way must be a challenge. Was there a specific process to that, or was it clear from the start how you were going to write it?

Sometimes as a songwriter, you feel an emotion and try to convey it poetically. But on that song particularly, I sort of said, “Fuck it,” and decided not to be poetic. I was going to be really direct and say exactly what was going on in a very obvious way.

I consciously made it very clear, and I’m hoping people resonate with those concepts—like when you’re breaking up with someone, wondering about your ex-partner, checking in through friends to see if they’re seeing someone else, if they’re moving on, or if they’re still in love with you. You’re trying to get a glimpse of that, and then you realize, “Oh no, they actually have moved on.” And you’re like, “Oh shit. Yeah, me too. I’ve moved on as well; I’m all good.” It’s a passive-aggressive resignation vibe. I just wanted to say it as openly and directly as possible.

Do you feel like it’s harder to write about those tough moments of weird limbo grief, or the moments of joy when the relationship was going well?

It seems much easier to write about limbo. Joy is so present. When you’re joyous, you’re in the moment, living it—you’re not reflecting. Limbo, pain, and heartbreak are just so much easier to access later for me personally, because I’m not being present. I’m sitting with a guitar thinking about a time that isn’t now.

After making this record, I was like, “Jesus, the songs are such downers; I should really write some happier songs!” Because I’m mostly a happy person and I have a lot of fun in life. I’m here at Lake Como having a great time with my partner, drinking Aperol Spritzes. My life is so good and joyous! But for some reason, sad songs just seem easy to write. We’re going to try and change that.

Now that this narrative is soon to be a public artifact of this story, does performing these songs feel like keeping a wound open, or does it feel stitched shut as an emphatic piece of closure?

It’s keeping the wound open, unfortunately. I experienced it most when doing recent shows in Melbourne and Sydney. I was so drained and emotionally hurt by the experience because I had to go into those songs emotionally, so intensely, for the whole hour set. I gave my absolute heart into it to do the songs justice.

At the end, you feel like you’ve just broken up with this person all over again. You’re offstage, everyone is trying to congratulate you on the show, but you feel like the breakup happened twenty minutes ago.

I need to find a way personally to not let that affect my life as much—to be able to sing the songs and go through the process without holding onto it too tightly, so I don’t get stuck in it. At the moment, it’s a bit of both. It’s a cathartic release—I had to do it to process the relationship, and it’s the way I chose to put a big final full stop on this chapter. But at the same time, this has got to end at some point so I don’t stay personally stuck.

Talk to me about the name of the record: Okay ok now. To me, “okay, okay” feels like an exasperated entry point. What does that phrase mean to you now versus when you were writing it?

The cool thing about it is that while making some merch recently, I was putting commas and full stops in different places—like “Okay. Okay, now” or “Ok ok now.” Each way you punctuate it slightly changes the meaning of the phrase. I’m enjoying the reinterpretation of what that phrase can mean because it’s so simple, but at the same time, it feels really deep and big.

At its core, originally, it was that exasperated acceptance—a resignation that the record is about saying goodbye, regret, and capturing all those things in a turn of phrase that feels simple yet intriguing. When I listen to the record, that line pokes out. Originally, the record was called “Once in a Lifetime,” but I changed it near the end because “Ok ok” just felt better.

What I love about it is that while it’s a breakup album about a specific period, there’s also a theme of not meeting expectations—comparing how you thought things were going to turn out when you were young versus how life actually unfolded. Looking back at your 18-year-old self starting in music, were there expectations of adulthood, love, or music that this album dismantled or affirmed?

With this relationship particularly, there was a naive expectation that we were going to end up together. We had this picture of what perfect romance was; we looked good together, and it all seemed great. But in reality, it just wasn’t. It shook up my world and made me realize there are no rules, and I shouldn’t have rigid expectations.

I was a traditional romantic at heart with these ideas of who I was going to end up with, and all of that got dismantled—which I think is for the better. Most of the time, the traditional story doesn’t happen that way, and it’s better to be open-hearted. Now I feel like you’ll end up with someone you didn’t expect to be with, and it just works. I used to be very set on: “This is how my life will be. I will get together with this person I went to school with, move back home, have kids, and write this.” All of that broke, which is good.

Were there any albums, films, or books you kept coming back to as touchstones while recording—either sonically or story-wise?

I was listening to Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher a lot around that time, and Adrianne Lenker’s records. I was also reading Alain de Botton—he writes a lot about love. I read The Course of Love a couple of times. He takes you through a couple’s life, hitting all these stereotypical moments of connection, but then pulls it apart and eradicates it. It’s all about how our understanding of love is sometimes misguided. That had a big impact on me.

Sonically, Adrianne Lenker and Big Thief were also touchstones. I wanted it to feel like a classic John Martyn or Joni Mitchell record, but in a modern sense—using little drum machines and synths, but keeping that traditional folk feeling inside of it.

A big part of my inspiration—which is probably weird—was the Justin Bieber acoustic sessions. His new records are great, but I heard him playing acoustic sessions with just him, an acoustic guitar, and a super-treated pop vocal with tons of doubles and pitch correction. I loved that sound: acoustic music, but super, super pop. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time and never could in the band—just an acoustic guitar and a super pop vocal.

What’s the ideal first listening scenario for someone putting on “Ok ok now” for the first time?

On your own, in headphones, at night, with a glass of wine and a cigarette, feeling a bit existential. It’s an existential moment with yourself. I had a lot of nights on my own like that, listening to the demos and writing the songs.

As the record wraps up on first listen, what do you hope sticks with people as the final note fades out?

I’m trying to get across the magnitude of heartbreak and breaking up with someone you thought was your soulmate. But the last song is the most hopeful. It’s an encouragement to get back out there: “Come on, you can do this, stop wallowing, go talk to somebody, make a connection.” It offers hope and positivity—there are many chapters in life, and you don’t have to get so hung up on this one.

Listen to Ok ok now on Spotify and Apple Music out September 4th. Follow Noah Hill on Instagram.

Book-to-film adaptations can be tricky, especially in attempts to convince an audience that the visual adaptation will meet, if not exceed, the experience of immersed, awe-invested page-flipping. In Cameron Moody's case, the prerogative of this visual translation was to veer from a narrative of Caribbean enslavement to one of pro-abolition, wonder, and personal growth through the eyes of a protagonist who, if following the novel, might not actually be the immediate touchstone for such themes.

While scoring Washington Black, Moody, who at just 23 has become one of the youngest composers nominated for a primetime Emmy Award, drew on personal intuition and long-held childhood dreams of becoming a composer to create a collection of songs that accompany our protagonist Wash’s growth and personal development throughout the spinoff.

Instrumentally, each moving part is emotionally and uber-specifically symbolic, though revealing the thought process of each choice might take away from the magic of simply viewing and listening. Of course, in standard TV viewership practice, it is the viewer's job to decipher which sound evokes what feeling, and oftentimes, the subject matter lends that to us without a need to listen too actively. All that said, after speaking to Moody, the choices of instrumentation, magnitude of orchestra, blips of silence, what have you, are far more calculated, or in his words, “earned” than we might consider.

Cameron is so insanely impressive, and we had such a fantastic conversation about bringing this score to life. I really hope you find a second and take a read!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

25F: First and foremost, congrats on the Emmy nomination—that’s super, super exciting!

Cameron Moody: Thanks so much.

I wanted to start talking about theme and world-building in the early stages—going through and reading this book as a novel versus going in and making a live-action adaptation of it. I’m curious how you balance the musical weight of trauma with the lighter sense of evolving from trauma into wonder and discovery. In the early stages, is that something difficult to reckon with, or do you know exactly what it’s going to look like? Where do you begin?

I was actually instructed not to read the book by the showrunner and the producers. They told me to stay away from it because the birth of the story they’re telling varies from some of the darker moments in the novel, so it would have only thrown me off course when we actually made the show.

To your point, the thing I latched onto early on was the idea that we’re leaning into the wonder and growth. They made it clear that this is not a story about slavery, bondage, or captivity—that’s just kind of the backdrop. It was really important to lean into the adventure aspect of Wash’s character and mindset as a way into writing the music. For me, it was really about holding onto that and trying to tap into my own sense of wonder when I was a kid discovering music for the first time—what that felt like, the excitement, and the desire to completely envelop yourself in that sort of thing.

Was avoiding the novel something where, in the back of your mind, you wondered what it would look like if you were following word-for-word what was in the book? Or were you just really excited to lean into this original version of the story and plot?

I think it was the latter. Because I had no frame of reference from any literary material, I came into it treating it as a singular piece versus an adaptation. I originally asked if I should read it purely as an exercise in preparation—not for any sort of narrative or musical inspiration—but looking at it as its own series helped me not bring any preconceptions about what it should sound like or feel like. I could just react directly to the picture.

If I had read it, I don’t know that it would have necessarily informed any of my musical decisions, but it would have been in the back of my mind—thinking, “Oh, that’s a little different than it was in the book,” or “That didn’t happen that way.” I preferred to have it be more organic and purely reactionary to the visuals.

What’s it like to build a motif based on sound—whether that’s a motif of wonder or a motif representing a point of a rut? How do you go about choosing instruments that you feel best reflect a character like Wash, who experiences so much growth but with such notable dips in his character progression?

There’s a certain measure of trial and error. I know what I like and what I would want to hear in certain moments, which makes those situations a bit easier. But also, the palette was largely predetermined going into this project because they said, “We want a big, organic acoustic orchestra, irrespective of region, culture, or geography, to be the musical underpinning of this whole story.”

In terms of certain instruments conveying specific emotions, I think it’s intuitive for me at least. If there’s a moment where something is very delicate, you might opt for a solo instrument. If there’s a big set-piece moment—an establishing shot, aerials, all that kind of stuff—maybe you unleash the power of the orchestra a bit more. I made it a point to utilize woodwinds because they’re such an undervalued color in contemporary scoring. They’re a wonderfully emotive section of the orchestra. Also, because we deal with Wash both as a child and as an adult, I wanted something that could portray innocence, but still have the capability and range to mature along with the character.

His theme started out as kind of a one-off moment in the pilot. There’s a scene where Titch shows up on a steam engine, and Wash has this little glimmer in his eye and cocks his head to the side like a puppy. I had this little woodwind figure that was the musical personification of an “aha!” moment or a lightbulb going off over your head. It felt like it really worked.

When you’re attaching a sequence to a character like Wash, do you go in hoping to make it a smooth, sequential thing, or do you go in understanding that it’s going to be fragmented—reflecting the character’s highs, lows, and varied interactions?

I think it’s a bit of both. In order to write a score that’s functional, you have to put the narrative first, so in that respect, it is going to be fragmented. There are going to be moments where it feels one way versus another way. The throughline across all of that is thematic material. If you have a theme that works, you can treat it according to the situation so it acts as the connective tissue for all those different moments.

Independent listenability isn’t really something I focus too heavily on while writing because that’s not the primary objective, but it’s an added benefit if listening to it standalone fits the curve of the episodes. When I listen to albums independent of the visual material, the best ones are those where you can “see” it without watching it. For example, when I listen to any score from John Williams, I can see exactly where Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter are based solely on what’s happening in the music. That’s a masterclass in musical storytelling. Rather than trying to force the music to sound a certain way, you take the narrative lesson, watch how it interacts with the picture, and apply that wisdom to your work. By osmosis, it bleeds into what you do.

Going back to the character of Titch—on the surface, he’s a mentor and abolitionist, but he’s also deeply flawed and erratic. How difficult is it to capture a character’s theme when they’re so polarizing, representing both a flawed nature and a touchstone of hope for Wash? Do you choose instruments that sound entirely different to represent those two sides?

The core challenge with this show was point of view. I could have taken an omniscient perspective from above, where you understand every character’s motivations and respond accordingly, but we needed to stay in Wash’s point of view the entire time. Everything that happens to him from other people is seen through his eyes. It was less important to create distinct individual musical material for Bedouin, Angie, Titch, James Wilde, or Erasmus, and more important to treat the score as if you were Wash.

In his interactions with Titch, until Wash got older and was abandoned, he saw Titch as the hero. So that’s how we played it. He saw Titch as the person who saved him—the person who put the bug in his ear that he could be more than a slave, that he could be a great scientist, create a flying machine, and live out his dream.

Even in the final episode, when Adult Wash runs into him again in Morocco, we don’t treat Titch as a villain. Titch was a deeply flawed, almost Shakespearean tragedy character who just wanted the approval of his father, which made him act in erratic ways. But there’s a degree of empathy there. When Wash sees him at the end, Wash has essentially written his own path, so he doesn’t need Titch’s protection anymore. He goes for closure—to find out why Titch left him and to impart the last words of Titch’s father. Titch isn’t inherently a bad guy. It was important that we not betray the child inside Wash when scoring their adult interaction, but rather show the human side of the character versus the superhero version Wash had as a kid.

Was there a grounding point or commonality in the sound to let the audience know that everything is being filtered entirely through Wash’s perspective?

I think it became a given after a while. Initially, you want to set the table in Episode 1 so everyone understands the lens through which we’re telling the story. But once that’s established, it’s easier to maneuver. Even in moments where Wash isn’t present, the story still unfolds with him at the center. Once we codified the palette, everything unfurled from there, and keeping the perspective consistent wasn’t as much of a challenge.

Since you were instructed not to read the book, were you ever pulled toward using historically or geographically accurate instrumentation for the time frame, or was the goal always to keep it timeless or modernized?

In my first meeting with the showrunner, she said this show was a “Peter Pan” sort of tale. The big pitfall we all wanted to avoid was anything that might tie us down geographically. We didn’t look at a symphony orchestra as anachronistic, so we didn’t feel the need to inject instruments specifically from antebellum America, Morocco, or other parts of Africa just to feel “period.” It was more about taking a broader emotional approach.

Their North Star for this score was E.T.—which was literally brought up in the meeting! Initially, I thought, “Well, that’s so unfair—that’s one of the greatest scores ever written, and you’re asking me to get in that general vicinity!” But what they meant was that this is a story about the power of dreams and the power of your mind. It needed to have the appropriate lift and magnitude of weight, and they felt a symphony orchestra was the only way to convey that. So we scrapped any specific ethnic or regional signals and opted to follow the emotional curve of the show.

The E.T. reference is fascinating. When a director gives you a massive benchmark like that, how do you process it without feeling overwhelmed or trying to copy it?

The reference was more abstract. I never once listened to the E.T. soundtrack in preparation to draw direct musical inspiration for the show. What they were after was the marriage of music and picture in the way that score worked with the movie.

The feeling you get watching Elliott fly with E.T. over the moon, or watching the kids take off on bikes in the final act—that feeling of lift, innocence, and excitement—those were the qualities they wanted to channel. In watching our show, it’s nothing like E.T. on the surface, but I understood what they were after. It wasn’t about trying to replicate anything thematically or in terms of palette; it was about how the music interacted with the picture and the feeling you get as an audience member coming out of the theater. We wanted the audience to feel like they’re in the backseat with this character, part of his journey, and ultimately sharing in his success.

I also like to talk about the use of silence in scores. Were there any scenes where deciding not to play music was challenging, but ultimately the right decision?

That definitely happened. I can remember a couple of scenes in the first few episodes where we had music originally, but while watching playback, we decided it wasn’t “earned.” Nothing was happening that warranted music, or it was just too much. If you’re constantly inundated with music in a movie, you never have time to process what’s happening.

The power of music often comes in its absence—choosing when to have pockets of silence. Sometimes that was determined during spotting, but sometimes it was after writing a cue and realizing, “No, I don’t think we need it.” It’s a weird choice as a composer because you naturally want as much of your music in the project as possible. But even during the dub, my music editors and I would look at each other and say, “I don’t know if we need music there,” or “Maybe we turn it down so it’s not distracting.”

Ultimately, those decisions benefit the flow. There were also opposite cases where a scene was silent, and we realized we needed a cue. It’s all about the pace and feel of the whole piece, which usually only reveals itself once you watch a big chunk of it back.

“Earning” a cue or earning silence is such an interesting way to put it. How do you determine whether a scene has earned music versus silence? Is there an unspoken criterion for that?

I think so. The worst thing a composer can do is try to manipulate the audience. If you have music just for the sake of music, it comes across as manipulative—specifically in moments of heightened emotion. If characters are distraught or crying, and you put your biggest “tug-on-the-heartstrings” music there just to make people cry, it feels forced and telegraphs your intent.

Earning it means having the appropriate level of music relative to the picture. For example, in the finale, there’s a moment right at the end where Wash and his mother commune in a vision. His mother, Tanna, is giving birth in the water back in Dahomey, while he’s off in the clouds talking to her. The sequence is about three minutes long, ending with them coming to an understanding of why she withheld the fact that she was his mother.

When they come together for the first time since he was a child, embrace, and look at each other, the temptation was to come out of the gate immediately with super emotional music to make people cry. But restraint and silence created tension and release. When they finally embrace and exhale, you feel that sense of finality, and you feel like you’ve earned the moment. You’ve built the ramp, and now you’re ready to release it.

To close things out: for people interested in film or TV scoring, what would be your recommendation for getting started and building momentum toward that career?

Learn the craft, learn the history, and do your homework. In order to know where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve come from. We live in a time with so much access to resources—you can go on YouTube and find documentaries about the early days of film music, or read books dedicated to single composers. Take full advantage of that abundance.

Even if the orchestra isn’t your thing and you want to write electronically, learn your software inside and out. Re-score scenes from movies, see how your music feels against picture, and get feedback from people. Ingratiate yourself, because the only way to learn is by doing—making mistakes, getting feedback, and putting in the work.

Also, in the social media era, people are much more accessible. You can write to a composer and say, “I loved this cue; do you have a few minutes to tell me how you did it?” Or if you live locally, ask to shadow them for a day. Success in this business relies heavily on relationships—being someone who is associated with good work, but also someone people want to be around in the trenches.

Follow Cameron Moody on Instagram or visit his website here. Watch “Washington Black” out now on Hulu.

Rigid rules. Spotless concert halls. Decades of prescribed, clean-slated elegance. The classical harp has been chained to a very specific, delicate functional expectation for what feels like forever. That is until you run its strums through tape machines, glitch pedals, and analog electronics to tear those prior generalizations to the ground.

Lara Somogyi doesn’t measure time in straight lines or strict tempos; she manipulates it through a purely sensory lens. On her upcoming album a [time] patterned, the harp becomes a tactile, fluid medium for processing loss, memory, and the beauty and occasionally harrowing nature of unpredictability. By relinquishing complete human control to analog loops and unexpected glitches in the waveforms, she transforms a single acoustic instrument into an intergalactic sea of sound that feels so inherently cathartic whether or not you have any context of the record’s subject matter or not.

I caught up with Lara to talk about this radical freedom of losing control to tape and the magic that comes with the loss of intentional patterns. Lara and what she does is really, really stinkin’ cool. I hope you’ll dive in below and give our chat a read.

25F: When you sit down with an abstract concept like “time,” where do you physically start at the harp?

Lara Somogyi: This record began from a curiosity — an attempt to explore, understand, or process the passing of time and the ways things change around it. Musically, I dove deep into time-based processing like tape machines, delays, glitch, loops, or anything that played with “time” in a sonic sense. I wanted to know how it feels in our bodies when we disrupt time or rhythm, when we support it, or when we simply flow with it. I also found it really natural to explore time through patterns on the strings beneath my fingers — the physicality of ordering my fingers differently from one phrase to the next.

What drew you to tape loops and repetition as the main tools for exploring how patterns form and break apart?

I was very curious to feel time physically. Tape is analogue and tactile, and you can explore it with your hands. There’s something incredibly exciting to me about rhythm and repetition, and then the process of disrupting that flow by introducing something unexpected. It brings you into a very present place, which is something I also discovered is really the only thing we know about time: what we’re experiencing right now, in the present.

Did working with physical tape loops change how you think about patience or control in your music? If so, how?

I love what tape loops create, and I love not feeling completely in control. It releases any judgment or second-guessing that might come up. That’s also why I love improvising so much — it’s about the freedom and radical acceptance of pure expression and momentary inspiration. It’s free and wild, and tape embodies that for me because we have only limited control over how it imprints and evolves, which I find exhilarating. Art is most exciting to me when it’s pure, instinctive, and uninhibited.

Was there a specific moment during recording where a pattern fell apart and led to an unexpected breakthrough? Does this happen more often than we might think?

Always. Some of the most beautiful moments I found while making this record came when patterns were interrupted or fell apart, leading to complete discoveries or sonic avenues that I never intended. Surrendering and observing, rather than trying to explain or control what I was discovering, became key parts of making this record.

Since “Sojourn” was the first piece written for the album, how did it set the tone for everything that followed aside from the fact that it is the opening track?

Sojourn was the first piece I wrote, and in a lot of ways it established the tonal language for the entire record. It was also the first time I plugged into the Cosmos pedal, and what you hear on the track is literally the first thing that emerged from my fingers. It felt like an unconscious statement, as if I had journeyed somewhere new. I also knew from that first session that strings were meant to be part of the piece, and that became a thread that continued throughout the record.

This is an album about grief. This feeling can make time feel slow, heavy, or non-linear. How did you try to capture those felt qualities of time in the arrangements?

I would say this album isn’t necessarily all about grief, but rather a reflection on time and memory. After I lost my father, I was trying to process time — why it moves, why things end, and why and how new things emerge.

The album can definitely be experienced in a non-linear way, but I also think that’s simply how I experience time. I don’t think I was aiming for, or felt, that the pieces necessarily feel slow or heavy. Instead, they feel reflective to me — an attempt at understanding. Through that, a tone of gratitude and celebration naturally found its way into the music. Feeling so lucky to have known and loved my father is the greatest gift.

Did making this record change your relationship with time or healing? Did it feel like it helped the healing process become easier or maybe expedite it at all?

It definitely helped heal my relationship with time. Creating this record unveiled that I process time through a sensory lens rather than literally, numerically, or even as a straight line. Time becomes marked by sensation, and the music naturally leaned into tactile form. The record is essentially a sonic diary, exploring how music doesn’t just measure time, but decorates it — leaving emotional and sensory markers that shape how we experience our days.

Rather than thinking, “Oh, 2023,” or “September last year,” I tend to remember time through sensory impressions instead: “the summer that smelled like cut grass and incense,” or “the month I heard the birch leaves in the wind.” That realization, and that understanding of how I experience time, has really helped me.

What first made you want to run a classical, acoustic instrument like the harp through pedal FX and electronics?

I first began experimenting with harp and electronics while I was living in London and spending time in the studio with my producer, who would later become my husband. We were both studying at the Royal Academy of Music, and there was this incredible studio full of outboard gear and seemingly endless opportunities to experiment.

We started by plugging the harp into simple delays and overdriving the compression just to see what would happen. Immediately, entirely new sounds and pieces began flowing out of my fingers in response. It became a completely new conversation with my instrument — the beginning of a long journey into sound that has shaped who I am as an artist.

Do you remember the very first pedal or effect you plugged your harp into, and what that moment felt like?

The first pedal was a Boss RC-30 Looper, followed by a Boss DD-3 Delay. Suddenly, I could create these large arrangements beyond what my own two hands could physically play. Instead of thinking within the limits of what I could reach, I was able to think like the conductor of a vast orchestra of harps, with the help of these sonic tools.

What is one technique or sound on this album that was completely new for you, if applicable?

One new piece of gear that my amazing producer and partner, Cyrus Reynolds, introduced me to while we were beginning research and the writing process for this album was the Cosmos by Soma Laboratory. It’s essentially a drifting memory station, which I thought was perfect for this record. It takes sounds and constantly recombines them spontaneously, creating an ever-changing environment.

That felt incredibly akin to the subject of the album and became a huge source of inspiration for me while writing. It opened up an entirely new conversation between patterns, the sonic embellishments of the electronics, and my harp and fingers.

Does adding electronics feel like you’re expanding the harp’s personality, or revealing something that was always hiding inside it?

Definitely both. For me, it feels like being an explorer — like uncovering a new galaxy. I’m going somewhere sonically that I haven’t gone before. Someone else might have, but for me it’s completely uncharted, and that’s incredibly exciting. At the same time, I do feel like it expands and redefines the harp’s capabilities. One of my favorite things about improvising with electronics is discovering sounds and possibilities that I haven’t experienced before on my instrument.

Growing up between Kauai and New York, how did those two very different environments shape your ear for music?

Reflecting on my early childhood in Kauai, it was such a calming place, surrounded by this incredible natural environment. I think I try to carry that sense of lush beauty — or at least the pursuit of it — into my music. The first song on the album, fingerprints, is both a nod and an ode to Kauai, where so much of my early self was formed. There’s also a field recording on that track taken from a place that deeply shaped me.

Later, while living in New York, I spent a lot of time in New York City. It was full of rhythm, drive, and cultural activity that endlessly inspired me and opened my mind to so many different musical worlds. It showed me that all of those worlds could somehow be reached through the harp.

What was the transition like going from classical training at the Royal Academy of Music to forging your own experimental path? Did paving this experimental trail ever feel like resistance to the classical training or an enhancement?

I think it was something I needed to do. I was lucky enough to be introduced to improvisation while I was at the Royal Academy, and I remember feeling so excited when I discovered it. It felt incredibly freeing, and something clicked for me.

I don’t think it was ever a resistance to my classical training. If anything, it was an expansion of it. My classical education gave me such a strong foundation, and improvisation and experimentation opened the door to curiosity, spontaneity, and trusting my instincts. The two have always felt deeply connected to me rather than at odds with one another.

How do you maintain your core artistic identity when moving between solo albums, scoring, and session work?

It can be challenging, but my sonic language is so deeply rooted in me and connected to who I am that I can usually keep it close. I definitely am inspired by the people I work with, and when I come back to my own music, I often find myself pushed further by those beautiful influences and by the incredible composers and artists I get to collaborate with. If you take a moment to distill the ideas and values you’ve absorbed and bring them back into your own artistic language, it can be a true gift.

What is a common misconception people still have about the harp that you love disproving?

I love showing listeners the vast landscapes of sound that the harp is capable of creating. From driving percussion and deep sub-bass to tape-like washes of sound created by removing the attack of the fingers, there’s so much I love discovering — and continue to discover — about this instrument. That really is one of my greatest joys: sharing those newfound sonic treasures with an audience.

You’ve worked a lot in the realm of film score composition. Has scoring taught you about mood and space that you bring back into your solo work?

Absolutely. It’s taught me so much — from emotional storytelling and the foundations of sound design to the importance of musical space, and just how much can exist in the silence between the notes. It’s inspiring to see how important and complementary both sonic storytelling and visual storytelling can be, especially together.

Is there a genre or style of music you haven’t brought the harp into yet that you’re dying to try?

I’ve recently become fascinated by choral music and the idea of how it might be translated — or perhaps reimagined — through the harp. There’s something about the expansiveness and movement of voices that feels like it could open up a really exciting new perspective on the instrument.

How do you know when a track is truly finished, especially when working with loops that could theoretically go on forever?

That’s a great question. Sometimes I wish they didn’t have to end! I could happily let a loop continue forever, flowing with improvisations on top of it. I’ve done that before, when two hours have passed without me realizing it. During that time I’ve built upon ideas, turned them upside down, folded melodies into one another, created transitions, and discovered entirely new pieces, all while following a single evolving loop.

It’s almost like a trance-like state, where you’re carried from one sonic river to the next, and I find that incredibly exciting. I wish I could release 45-minute versions of these patterned pieces (maybe I will one day — I do love an extended cut!). But eventually, I have to let a piece exist as it is. Usually, I know it’s finished when it feels like it has said everything it needed to say.

Looking ahead, what feels like the next open door for you musically?

I’m so excited to tour this record and build a more expansive live set where the transitions between the pieces feel just as exploratory and exciting as the pieces themselves. Lately, there’s been a real magic in the in-between for me, so I’m looking forward to exploring those spaces sonically as well.

What is one piece of advice you’d give to instrumentalists who want to push the boundaries of their traditional instrument?

I would say: follow that instinct, and flow with it. Something is calling you to uncover new luminaries of sound within your instrument, and I really believe you have to follow that enchantment. For me, it almost felt like I didn’t have a choice. It was something I simply needed to do.

Stay deeply curious, and follow that curiosity for as long as you can.

If you could sum up “a [time] patterned” in three words, what would they be?

Curiosity. Sensorial. Memories.

Listen to “a [time] patterned” on Spotify or Apple Music on August 28. Follow Lara Somogyi on Instagram.

The Jason Statham flick sequence is unmistakable and hyper-blatant: bad guy pretends to be good, good guy’s friend dies at the hands of the masked man, Statham’s character craves vengeance, and after browsing through carnage with his own hands, knuckles, and sharp metal shrapnel, satisfies that itch for justice. Perhaps this illustration feels overly simplistic, maybe even reductive at its core, but it’s all the ingredients that make Statham storylines worth re-writing. The anti-ambiguous nature of each timeline, bone-shattering low-end booms, and tension-mustering scores give it that no-frills addictive cinema-cigarette draw. Attention spans, after all, are a dying trend and super out of style.

When Marcus Trumpp set sail off to capture the soundscapes of murder-framed Statham (Cole Reed) and his container-ship revenge quest, it was an immediate instinct that the samples used were organic and as on-the-plot as possible. Gathering takes from foghorns and banging containers, the instruments, pads, buttons, and gizmos behind the walls of his studio served merely as stilts to enhance the raw recordings.

Though collaborative in their efforts, Trumpp immediately clarifies to me that we should think of this as a Jean-François Richet before it is an addition to the Statham saga. Sure, the Beekeeper-G.I. Jones Cop extraordinaire is crucial to the story, but he assures me that without his directorial input on both a sonic and visual level, it’s unclear if any actor could hit what Richet has hit with Mutiny.

Marcus and I had a fantastic conversation about my time at the press screening and all things production and narrative-to-sound connection. I hope you take a read!

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

25F: When you first sit down with something like Mutiny, is that something where you’re measuring the Statham tempo and trying to mimic that? Are you trying to syncopate with punches, or are you trying to be as random as the punches are with the soundtrack?

Marcus Trumpp: Actually, it’s a lot more calculated. First of all, yeah, it’s a Statham movie, but to me, it’s mainly a Jean-François Richet work. He’s a director I’ve worked with multiple times before. The thing he does very well is that even if it’s a ridiculous premise or a fun, silly action movie, he always finds a way to ground it in a unique way that makes it very dark and gritty.

When I first saw it, it was very clear that he didn’t want it to be like The Transporter or the usual over-the-top Statham stuff. It’s way more grounded. In a way, you’re right that some beats are ridiculous and the fight scenes are really insane, but the whole backdrop is very serious. It pulls away a little from that over-the-top Hollywood Fast & Furious type of stuff he’s probably better known for. I think people will be surprised to see that it’s way more grounded and level-headed than usual.

Before I saw it, I expected it to be way more flashy with ninja moves or whatever. I was surprised by how well he was able to confine an over-the-top actor into this role, and Jason does it really well. He definitely pulls it off.

When you’re working with a director you know so well like Jean-François, how much of the early scoring process is written shorthand versus him telling you to throw out the rulebook and do something weird?

It goes both ways. Ever since I started working with him, it was clear that he’s very good at articulating what he wants the audience to feel. He does not necessarily know musical terminology because he approaches it from a conceptual perspective.

Early on, it’s about figuring out what palette we’re allowed to use. On this one specifically, we wanted to keep it very gritty and electronic. We used a lot of processing. We recorded a whole bunch of containers, doing percussive knockings that I would feed into my instrument here to create really cool, evolving loops that added to the soundscape. At first, it was about figuring out the palette based on the story he wanted to tell, and then springboarding from there.

And then I’m sure you get to the moment where you have to consider recurring themes and thus recurring music, huh?

Yeah, and then we have the main theme that comes back—his backstory with his deceased dad and all that stuff—that defines him as vulnerable in the beginning. That’s interesting to see because he’s usually the guy who just kicks ass and doesn’t take names. Jean-François really wanted to show the character behind that who is somewhat vulnerable.

We used that as a backdrop to fill out the soundscape, which was very confined because it takes place on a ship. We knew there would be a lot of sound effects from waves and wind, but in that confined space under the deck, we found ways to infuse those sounds into the score. If you listen to the score, you’ll hear a lot of metallic elements. It gets very spooky under the decks, so it was really cool to explore that.

Before I watched the movie, I listened to the score without visual correlations. You get that undertone of a buildup to a crazy action movie, and you have the inkling of a premise with a big cargo ship, and that’s it. When you watch the movie, though, I find that the cargo ship, in line with the score, is kind of its own character. I know you mentioned synthesizing these sounds, but did you end up sampling industrial sounds from the real world, or were those generated entirely in the studio?

That’s exactly what I meant before. That foghorn you hear in the very beginning turns into the Artemis motif, which is based on a minor 7th that is relentless—you’re supposed to feel like this big ship is an unstoppable thing that just keeps going. It also became Captain Marco’s theme in a way.

The Artemis itself was actually the first idea that came up because it is a character, and that was one of the early discussions. Having a motif for the Artemis where it creeps in when he boards and builds up during certain sequences on the ship gave it that presence. All of those things are sound-based. The foghorn is a sample; I went to San Pedro and recorded a collection of foghorns, settled on one, and fed that into my setup. We ran it through a whole pedalboard to generate that motif. Because it’s based on feedback, it constantly adds more elements and evolves.

Even though the task was to keep it primarily electronic, we didn’t want it to feel static. Synths can sometimes feel static, but this is supposed to constantly evolve and feel organic across the character arcs. It can’t just repeat; it always has to go somewhere. Finding those sound pockets to explore was a really awesome phase.

Half of the intrigue is that you have these rumbling low ends, but you also have a really nice use of silence at times. Is approaching quiet bits to build tension something you do intentionally on your own, or is there a lot of back-and-forth with Jean-François? Or is it just blatantly obvious where the silent bits should be?

There’s way more calculation in it than might meet the eye at first. There were bits where music was placed initially, and then we decided that once we put it against everything else, it was more effective to keep it in our back pocket. Once it bursts into the frame or kicks into action, it becomes way more effective that way. About 80% was calculated in terms of keeping scenes dry, but there were spots where we added music where there was none, or took music out where it was already placed.

Were there any specific decisions regarding pauses or rumbling low ends that were highly debated between you and Jean-François? What was the resolution?

One particular moment towards the end was in flux—the whole sequence where he goes up the ship and has that interaction with the captain. There was score there, and then we took it out for certain parts towards the end.

The editing was being refined until the very last moment. Even though it was clear how we were going to arrive there, tightening it up meant finding those moments to pull back and let the scene between him and Marco play out by itself. Toward the end, there was more tweaking compared to the beginning, where introducing the themes and motifs was clear from the start.

I was going to ask about the harpoon scene specifically, which, if you’re reading at home and haven’t seen the film yet, you’re in for a treat. Is that something where you felt it needed to stand on its own without music over it?

Absolutely, that was clear. When you watch these scenes early on, there are no sound effects yet, so there’s no initial impact. I remember a similar sequence on Plane where snipers are shooting at the bad guys. The first time I saw raw footage, my instinct was to fill it up with hits and big score elements to create impact. Jean-François said, “No, don’t worry about it. The sound of this gun will pretty much obliterate the whole theater like an elephant gun, so stay out of it.”

Remembering that moment, we knew the harpoon was going to be the loudest thing in the theater.

In the press screening, everyone went, “Oh my God, what the fuck!.”

Exactly. So we left space for that.

If you had to assign a musical instrument or synth patch to represent the Statham aura at large or in this film, what would it be and why?

What I settled on at the end sounded like an EBow guitar, but very distorted, a bit lo-fi, with a lot of noise. It’s very rusty around the edges.

If I ask people what the instrument is, most say it’s a guitar, but it’s actually a synth sound I created and ran through a lot of gear. The idea was to represent a guy who has a rough core and can mess things up, but there is a vulnerability to him.

It was about choosing the right register for it. When the Navy arrives, that sequence features the full theme playing out as it was intended, rather than just bits and pieces. The instrument shines there because it has a morning sadness to it, but it’s still strong and not overly lamenting. It worked really well in contrast to the slow-motion Navy footage and made the scene shine.

Are you given any parameters or references by Jean before beginning the score, or are you given a rough cut without a score and given the freedom to do what you want with feedback later?

A bit of both. Generally, Jean-François will say, “This is the kind of stuff I listened to while writing the script or editing.” Most of the temp track was actually temped with Plane, along with some Sicario.

He really likes minimalist, repeating stuff that forces you to boil things down to one very clear idea. That’s where the 7th interval idea for the Artemis came from—the fact that it always repeats and has a relentlessness to it.

After watching the first cut, I noted to him that the Artemis is its own character. That was the first thing I started working on. It went through different intervals before we settled on the minor 7th. It was ambiguous enough that it wasn’t harsh or dissonant, but you can feel that it wants to keep going. It would have felt different with a 5th or a 4th, but the 7th just happened to work out really well.

For someone earlier in their career who is interested in getting into film scoring and composition, what is a piece of practical advice you wish someone had given you when navigating the business?

Don’t say no to anything, especially in the early stages. Do as much as you can because every single piece of real-life experience matters. You can go to school for this, and programs teach you the background and technical aspects, but actually doing it is the most important thing.

A lot of the most successful people are the ones who went in and did it without getting too caught up in academics. When I went to USC, we did everything with a stopwatch and handwritten orchestral parts. Six months after I graduated, everything shifted from ADAT to Pro Tools, so all that specific technical knowledge went out the window. Technology always evolves, so staying on the cutting edge is important.

Only use technology if it makes your work better, not easier. People often use technology as a creative crutch, which you should never do. Don’t use AI for generating MIDI ideas.

Say yes to everything you can, and don’t give up. It’s a jungle, and at the end of the day, you just have to stick around long enough to get your moment.

Follow Marcus Trumpp on Instagram or visit his website here. Watch Mutiny in theaters on August 21st.

It is very easy to misinterpret the rigorous, hyper-disciplined architecture of classical training as a form of confinement. For years, the world of formal movement and strict vocal structure demands a complete surrender to precision, building rigid walls around a performer that prioritize perfection over raw, uninhibited self-expression. Yet, when that very discipline is weaponized by an artist who refuses to remain neatly within those lines, something far more disruptive takes shape.

Stripped of industry-standard expectations and rigid genre blueprints, the world of Brazen Barbie is powered by an uncompromising, self-reliant instinct to take up space on her own terms. Moving from the precise mechanics of childhood ballet and choir to the unfiltered, self-produced friction of heavy electric guitars and fast, choppy rap flows, she approaches her craft with the fearless authority of someone who has little to hide. Her work thrives in the quiet, instinctual vacuum of complete creative control.

We had an awesome chat about transforming years of rigid discipline into boundless artistic agency, navigating the tension between bulletproof confidence and emotional vulnerability, performing live with two right shoes, and so much more.

It was such a fantastic conversation, and I hope you take a moment to dive in!

25F: Before music, you spent a decade as a ballet dancer. Did that nonstop schedule help build your current stage presence?

Brazen Barbie: I started ballet around three, then added hip-hop and breakdancing later on. It definitely helps with stage presence and performing in front of a crowd. It also built my creative confidence when collaborating with others.

Beyond dance, you also have choir experience. Did you make a conscious choice to leave singing behind for rap, or is singing something you still plan to integrate into your career?

I always wanted to rap, but I didn’t realize at first that I could just jump right into it, so I started with singing and choir. I never explicitly decided to stop singing, but my live voice wasn’t as confident back then, and I don’t like recording anything I can’t execute off the cuff live. I’ll likely segue back into it through hooks or melodic bridges. I actually have a few unreleased tracks with singing on them.

Speaking of shifting styles, you’ve experimented with dance tracks alongside rap. Are there other genres you’ve explored behind the scenes or want to try?

I made a rock/metal remix of “Heavy Rings” that isn’t out yet. I really want to drop an EP blending hip-hop and rock—that heavy electric guitar sound over hip-hop drums sounds so cool.

What were you listening to growing up that made you a fan of music in the first place?

A lot of Missy Elliott CDs and music video DVDs, especially Respect M.E. and Under Construction.

Missy Elliott is especially famous for taking up space in the industry and making it a positive rather than a thing of inferiority. As a self-produced writer and artist, what lessons about owning your space have you applied to your career?

I’m still growing in that regard, but a major turning point was making my first mixtape. I realized I can do whatever I want, experiment with weird sounds, and ignore everyone else’s expectations. If people don’t like it, I don’t care—at least it’s authentic to me. When I made “Deep End,” which is quite different, I didn’t follow standard formulas. I go into the studio alone, without pre-planned ideas, and just roll with whatever weird direction I feel that day.

Was that unapologetic mindset natural for you, or did you have to learn to tune out external opinions?

It wasn’t about tuning out feedback from others so much as overcoming my own youthful fear of criticism. Overcoming that fear helped me mature as both an artist and a person. I’m much prouder of my music now because it actually feels like me.

If you got the call tomorrow to play the Super Bowl halftime show with an unlimited budget, what’s the opener, setlist vibe, and stage design?

I’d open with “Deep End” or the heavy rock mix of “Heavy Rings” to start high-energy. Visually, I’d want something theatrical and artistic. I love how artists like Zara Larsson and Beyoncé structure their live shows—their approach to performance design is super inspiring.

What non-musical media influences your work?

I read a lot of books as a kid. I didn’t grow up as an “iPad kid” attached to screens, so I spent my time outdoors, reading, or watching TV shows. That upbringing made me engage with art in real life rather than purely digitally.

You had a packed schedule growing up—track, ballet, choir. How did that level of structure shape your visual and artistic vision today?

As a kid, having that much structure makes you feel like you’re missing out on hanging out with friends. Looking back, though, my parents were right—it paid off. Ballet gave me the discipline and drive to invest fully in myself and my music.

Do you have a specific backstage routine?

I don’t really have a routine—I probably should! Backstage is usually chaotic, mostly me frantically putting on jewelry and going straight out.

Before a show last year in Melbourne, I bought new shoes for the show and didn’t open the box until ten minutes before going on stage. It turned out they gave me two right-foot shoes in different sizes! I had to perform with two right shoes. Now my only mandatory pre-show routine is checking my footwear.

Did that shoe incident trigger any superstitions for you?

Luckily nothing went wrong during the performance, so no. But I am fairly spiritual, which I get from my mom. We both get eerie moments where dreams we have end up coming true a few days later.

Do you feel like your music career was something you subconsciously manifested?

Definitely. I think focused intent helps, but manifestation doesn’t work without putting in the hard work alongside it.

Navigating an independent career with self-released projects like BRAZEN and TOO BRAZEN requires a serious grittiness. When did it hit you that your career was truly taking off?

Dropping those first two mixtapes built my national and international audience. Hearing my tracks played on Ebro Darden’s Apple Music show and featured on The Chi were huge validation moments where I could see the hustle paying off.

In those big moments, do you pause to celebrate, or are you immediately focused on what’s next?

I’m terrible at slowing down to appreciate milestones. I usually just brush it off and immediately hyper-focus on the next project.

Taking things in takes vulnerability. Do you find it harder to bring high energy and attitude to a track, or to show your vulnerable side?

Showing vulnerability is definitely harder for me. I’m slowly learning to open up more in my writing. Tracks like “What Do I Care” and “En Route” were more personal, and while it’s tough knowing people are reading into my life, vulnerability creates the best art.

Do your lyrics flow out intuitively and make sense later, or do you meticulously plan every line?

A mix of both. Sometimes I write intuitively and only realize the deeper meaning afterward. Certain tracks come together in minutes, while others take days of refining.

Do you ever reach a point where you feel you’ve overworked a track?

I don’t record until a song is fully written. If I’m sitting in the studio and a beat starts looping to the point of frustration, I’ll turn it off, write in silence, or step away and come back later.

On the production side, are there any techniques or sounds you’re currently experimenting with?

I haven’t released a fully self-produced track yet since I’m still learning, but Kwame and I co-produced my recent On The Radar freestyle beat—it’s a raw, old-school hip-hop groove. The “Heavy Rings” rock remix also required a lot of custom drum design. I’m excited for people to hear that shift.

You’re heading out on a UK/European tour soon. What’s one comfort item from home you wish you could pack?

Proper chocolate milk! When I was in New York recently, I couldn’t find regular chocolate milk anywhere—just protein shakes. Australia has a brand called Big M that is elite.

Do you have any hidden talents people might not expect?

I can pick up instruments by ear very quickly. Lately, I’ve been learning electric guitar so I can play it live alongside my rock tracks.

If you could trade lives with any character from a 2000s TV show or movie for 24 hours, who would it be?

Phoebe Halliwell from Charmed—no hesitation. I relate to her wildness, heart, and impulsivity.

Complete this sentence: “If you hear a Brazen Barbie track coming through the speakers, the first thing you should do is...”

Turn it up, and don’t turn it off!

Listen to Brazen Barbie on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Brazen Barbie on Instagram.

I’ll be the first to admit that my relationship with country music has historically been built on a foundation of distance. For a long time, the genre felt like a fortress built entirely around a very specific, rigid set of ideals: heartbreak, small-town domesticity, and a brand of stoic masculinity that leaves teeny tiny gaps for the quiet, tender complexities of one’s own life.

Yet, beneath the glossy, radio-ready tropes lies something far more primal. Stripped of its modern artifice, country music is, at its core, a genre powered by the haunting disposition of yearning and the yearners who make the feeling so profound. It is an art form built on the weight of lonesomeness, and the desperation of reaching for something just beyond your grasp. When you peel back the layers of traditionalism, that intense, unvarnished longing isn’t just a classic trope; it’s an inherently queer feeling, a silent language spoken by anyone who has ever loved from the margins or pined for an unattainable lover.

Andrew Sa, armed with a velvet, crooning voice, a poet’s precision, and a deep reverence for the lineage of classic country, is on a mission to reclaim its soul with room for fresh, uncharted discourse. Across his beautiful, albeit devastating record American Rough, he weaves high-art poetry, Tennessee Williams-esque desire, and raw vulnerability into the traditional country fabric both blatantly and through passive, cross-media inspirations. By reimagining the archetype of the rugged cowboy into a figure of tenderness and flawed devotion, a crucial bridge is created between the early voices that built the genre’s walls and the possibility of queer intimacy narratives being included in that infrastructure.

We chatted about transforming solitude into catharsis, what happens when you dare to put a mirror up to classic American storytelling, and so much more. It was such a beautiful chat, and I hope you take a second to read!

25F: I feel like country music, from the admittedly limited amounts I listen to, is so focused on heterosexual heartbreak and small-town domesticity. The big question I want to start with is: how do you approach writing about queer romance and intimacy when it doesn’t necessarily feel like an organic part of the genre’s emotional vocabulary?

Andrew Sa: I feel like it’s a new frontier, and there’s so much work to do. I actually see that as a blessing because there are many contributions I can make, and, of course, many other queer country artists are doing the same.

It’s funny you say that, because one of the things I’ve always loved about country music is that yearning, that longing you feel. That is felt throughout a lot of country music, especially classic country music into even the ‘60s. I feel like that is such a queer thing. Or rather, it’s something that myself as a gay man—especially in situations of the unattainable lover—feels so deeply. So while the specificity of that vocabulary hasn’t necessarily been there, it definitely has queerness in it already.

How does your version of the “American Rough” gentleman redefine what it means to be tough, vulnerable, and desirable in a country space?

This character is the object of my desire throughout the record, and he certainly isn’t simple. What I’d like to do is ultimately challenge the ideas of what masculinity is.

I think that tenderness and patience are masculine traits, though they don’t get the spotlight most of the time when we think about that word “masculinity.” But I think about cowboys, and I think of my grandfather who had that essence. He was so patient, understanding, and tender. I can’t pretend that this “American Rough” character that I sing to throughout the record isn’t flawed, which is one of the reasons why it’s a devastating record to many.

How do you use this traditional country vocabulary of longing to frame queer intimacy on a physical level?

One of the ways I do it across the record is through a lot of talk about looking. In a song like “In,” I do talk about the act itself, but there’s a lot about looking and desire from afar.

My experience and love for classic country music, mixed with my newer-found love of absorbing as much queer and gay poetry as possible, comes from trying to learn from our ancestors how to talk about intimacy and love. The blending of those two things has really helped me form my own vocabulary that feels a part of the genre, but slightly askew or rearranged.

I was looking through your Instagram and saw you talking about Arthur Rimbaud among other household poets. How does high art poetry translate into not only the themes of country music, but ultimately the vernacular and language?

It’s funny because country music is oftentimes very heavy-handed and straightforward, with not a lot of room for interpretation. That’s understandable—it’s the music of the people, meant to connect in broad strokes.

But that’s not the only music I love. I love folk music, especially the folk revival—Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen. My love for those songwriters brought me to poetry and high art. I don’t know if it inherently has a place in country music, or that I could speak on the intersection of that other than just through my own work. Because I love both, I’m able to put them together. I like to offer my audience different ways into the music, and through poetic language, I can give them a mirror to see themselves in the story.

When you were producing and writing this, was that integration and preservation of nuance a conscious decision, or was it something you realized after writing it?

It was an intentional thing. My co-producers, H.C. McEntire and Missy Thangs, helped me with this. H.C. is an incredible poet and has a beautiful, raspy country voice—she sings backup for me across a lot of the record, and we wrote some songs together. She inspired me tremendously when it came to poetic language and songwriting.

H.C. and I talked about our intentions when starting this record. One was: how do you deliver something specific, but general enough to offer those entry points for listeners? We found that in poetic language, and by aiming to create something that feels both classic and modern. It was all very intentional.

A big theme in this record is closeness, and at the opposite end of that, lonesomeness. With that, I was reading about Hank Williams and Patsy Cline as early inspirations for you, both of whom sing of these two feelings regularly. These ideas have endured through all types of country music. What does being lonesome mean to an artist like Andrew Sa today versus what it looked like to Hank Williams or Patsy Cline?

I’ll start with what we have in common: desire. Whether that’s desire for sex, love, affection, or—in the earliest country music—a desire for home and things lost along the way.

On the other end, my mom left my family when I was 4 years old because she wasn’t cut out for the white-picket-fence life. She was the first person who instilled a love of country music in me. When she left, I started requesting Patsy Cline tapes in my father’s truck and my grandparents’ car. I’ve begun to attribute my inherent connection with that longing feeling to the loss of my mother at such a young age.

Do you feel like these longing, solo moments are more revealing when disclosing them through song and performance than the bigger, blatant romantic desires you also touch on?

I think so. I have a background in theater, and I understand that revealing vulnerable, isolated brokenness in stories can be very cathartic for an audience. It was for me. I reached for that Patsy Cline tape at a young age because it helped me process what I was going through before I even fully understood it.

That’s something I want to offer my listeners. Music can be deeply healing, and those lonesome, broken moments can be what someone really needs in a desperate situation.

Are there historic figures or demographics you feel like you’re in conversation with on this record?

A couple of people. One is Quentin Crisp, who wrote The Naked Civil Servant. He was an out British gay man living from the ‘30s through the ‘90s with a witty sense of humor. He often talked about the object of his desire being “the great dark man.” Because of that alone, I feel in conversation with him; that figure is very similar to “American Rough.”

The other person is Tennessee Williams. I absorb as many of his plays as I can, and I believe the “American Rough” character is a recurring theme throughout his work.

Tell me about any wisdom Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country offered you directly or indirectly that you carried into the studio aside from the obvious “Lavender Cowboy” tribute on the record.

It was more of an affirmation. I met him in 2018, opening for him at The Hideout in Chicago, and we became good friends. Hearing his version of country music—with his language and explicitly gay personal experiences—permitted me to enter the genre.

I spent a year writing, and at his next show a year later, he watched my whole opening set from the corner of the room. He was the first person to greet me afterward. He grabbed both my arms, looked up at me, and said, “I didn’t see you before, but I see you now.”

That stuck with me as an affirmation that I made the right choice and an unspoken permission to keep doing what I was doing. He was completely without ego. If a musician messed up a solo on stage, he would just say, “Play it again.” He was the most giving man.

Was that permission something you were waiting to receive, or did he give it to you unexpectedly and you ran with it?

The latter, although I believe he knew exactly what he was doing. Everyone in the queer country space knew Patrick, played a show with him, or was touched by him. He often told me, “I am your stepping stone to lift you.” He came into that late-in-life attention in such an egoless, giving place.

When American Rough finds that sort of attention you describe with Patrick’s music, imagine you find the record in a jukebox in a 1975-style Texas dive bar. What song are you choosing to play first, and what will happen when it plays?

Probably “Lavender Cowboy.” Beyond the obvious, I want people to learn about Patrick. I intentionally wrote that song open enough to be about any Western-styled elder in someone’s life.

I’d also love for it to be “You Turned Me On.” That song seems to be a fan favorite so far, and it’s the most unabashedly gay song on the record. The idea of playing that in a honky-tonk jukebox would be amazing.

Are there any traditional country tropes you will always stand by, or any you feel we can let go of?

A visual trope I’ll always hang onto is the cowboy hat. It’s so sexy, powerful, and I love how light and shadow play on it. As for themes, longing and yearning are things I hope never cease in country music.

I’d rather keep it positive and leave it with those, along with the gentility and sweetness that country personalities try to exude.

Since the record has been out for over a month—after a 3- to 5-year process of writing and producing—what has been the most surprising reaction you’ve received from listeners or peers?

It’s the people who approach me at the merch table to thank me.

As a young gay man who discovered Rufus Wainwright’s Poses at 16, hearing stories close to my experience in an open, gay, crooner way permitted me to be myself. I’m surprised and moved that I am now offering that same thing to other gay people.

It has also felt like coming out again because I’m revealing more about my sexual identity—beyond just being gay, but also being submissive; this is a record of devotionals. Being approached by straight men who align with that narrative and thank me for offering them a mirror to celebrate how they love has been very surprising, but incredible and emotional.

That makes 100% sense. I find when popular country music is released, it’s put out for the general public rather than a specific demographic, even though the stories being told are still quite nuanced and specific. This record is a celebration of queerness, but also a celebration of the human voice. Seeing people outside that demographic celebrate it in their own way builds a wonderful bridge, I’m sure.

That’s what I prefer over something disruptive or negating. When you look back at Hank Williams and classic male country singers, they didn’t just sing about trucks. They sang about heartbreak, begging for forgiveness, and deep yearning. Men would sit in bars, holding each other and crying over loss. That classic catharsis is what I’m trying to tap into and bring back, because that healing is something everyone—especially straight men—needs more of.

Now that the record is out, when a listener plays it on a solo night drive or with headphones on, what do you hope they take away now, and what did you hope they’d take away while writing it?

Now that it’s out, I hope people realize that leaning into love and running toward it with open arms is the answer.

While writing it, my goal was to give people a safe place to feel things they were afraid to feel—and, put simply, to make people cry.

Well, it’s a triumph in that aspect, no doubt.

Listen to American Rough on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp. Follow Andrew Sa on Instagram.

When cinematic universes reveal themselves in a non-linear fashion (think prequels, epilogues, character spinoffs), it’s easy to wonder whether a composer might consider harking back to its anchor timeline and make tweaks, or if they feel the need to scrap it for the sake of originality and separation. For Dan Romer, there was no question that Game of Thrones would remain entirely external (from a musical perspective) and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms would harness its own cadence.

In its conception, the sound spectrum found itself lodged somewhere within the bounds of dusty southern pub-faring standoffs and a pre-fantastical, working-class utopias—a finer line than you might consider upon first read. Dragons, of course, might make these sounds far more decipherable, but if you choose to watch (which I implore you to do), there is an absence of, you guessed it, dragons.

I find that when a score is successful, it does so by making the fantastic feel intimately human, and in some cases, innate human intricacies outlandish and out of reason. Romer’s ear lies in stripping away the grand, high-fantasy architecture we’ve come to expect from Westeros, replacing grandiosity with the tactile scrape of gut strings and dusty, basement percussion. By prioritizing grit over majesty, he reframes the lore not through the eyes of lords and dragons, but through the calloused hands of a hedge knight simply trying to survive the road.

In my humble, amateur, fish-for-an-alter-ego opinion, it is a masterclass in world-building—one that proves the vastness of a cinematic universe measures itself by specificity of soul rather than an over-saturation of thematic hullabaloo.

What a cool experience to have this chat. I hope you all love it and dive right on in!

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

25F: Thanks again so much for hopping on today.

Dan Romer: Thank you so much for having me.

First and foremost, congrats on the Emmy nomination!

Thank you so much.

What’s that like? How does that feel?

It’s incredible. It’s just so cool to have this come from the community, you know? I love being a part of this community, and it’s such an honor.

Yeah. When you’re stepping into a universe as big as the one Ramin Djawadi builds for GOT, how do you decide when to let this score stand on its own versus pulling from those other two universes that feel a lot bigger, more fantastical, and less working class focused?

We basically wanted to do a very different thing. We wanted it to have its own musical identity that felt entirely working class as the show suggests. We used a lot more solo instruments than the original Game of Thrones score to give it a folk, “brawler” score feel. There are moments where we dipped into the palette of what you’d expect from the main show as a tool, but the heart of the show comes from more focused instrumentation.

Was there a specific instrument that locked in that grounded, working-class Westeros sound for you?

It was the nylon-string guitar. I restrung it with synthetic gut strings to emulate the sound of a guitar traditionally strung with animal guts.

Are you watching a cut with no score and immediately thinking of a string like that? Or are you playing around with the sound before even watching the show to nail it down?

The task at the very beginning was to make a score that felt like it could exist in a cowboy film, but at the same time exist in Westeros.

Yeah, I get a Spaghetti Western vibe for sure.

It was about creating a Venn diagram of what sounds and harmonies could exist in both a cowboy film and Westeros. We didn’t want to use instruments outside of those two worlds. It was a very narrow set of sounds and harmonies to satisfy both feelings.

Where is the threshold where it tips too far into a full cowboy movie versus the “dusty lone wanderer” phase? Is there a specific sound where you know you’ve gone too far?

If we hit an electric guitar with treble on it and it goes wah-wah-wah-wah, we know we’ve gone too far. It was mostly about sticking to organic sounds that would have been available in this time period.

How do you handle class structures through sound? You give Dunk the guitars, fiddles, and whistling, and then you give the Targaryens these big, operatic roles similar to a Djawadi score. How do you approach assigning instrumentation to reflect different class structures? Do you bucket those sounds before creating the tracks?

You hit the nail on the head. For the working-class music, we stick more to guitar, fiddle, solo cello, and frame drum (a drum held with one hand and played with the other). When it comes to royalty like the Targaryens, we pull out the bigger orchestra with more complex classical harmony and movement.

Did you cross-reference the Targaryen music from Game of Thrones to align with this upper-class sound, or was it a different approach?

We weren’t referencing the Targaryen music in Game of Thrones for ours. The idea for our Targaryen music was to make it sound like a classic, almost cartoonish villain sound. That allowed us to draw on a completely different set of harmonies, which sets it apart from Dunk and Egg’s music.

Were there any unique instrumentations or non-traditional objects used as samples/sound effects that listeners might not catch on a first watch?

Absolutely. One of my main tension percussion sounds was Dunk unsheathing his sword, which I stretched out to four times lower than the original. It created a long, drawn-out, slow-motion bell sound with a weird microtonal pitch. Whenever we needed tension, I would hit that sample here and there.

What is your favorite part of this process? Is it learning about the characters, discovering their unique sound, or post-production?

I love the research process. When I score films set in specific times or places, I make gigantic playlists of that music to learn it through osmosis. I did that with Italian film scores for Luca, Hawaiian music for Lilo & Stitch, and medieval music for Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours 10 years ago.

Generally though, the most fun part is working on the big main theme: layering it with different sounds, trying textures, and exploring colors. In my 20s, I produced and played in rock bands, which involved a lot of layering and figuring out what goes where. It brings me back to sitting with a 4-track tape recorder, a guitar, and a synth, just layering sounds endlessly.

How much does the main theme inform the rest of the score? Do you write it first, last, or does it vary?

I rarely do the big theme first. I’ll usually write the chords and melody before scoring to picture, but I like working chronologically to feel where we’re coming from. It’s like a pop song—the chorus means less when you don’t know what the verses are. A verse that leads into a chorus informs how big that chorus needs to be. Knowing where you’re coming from informs where you’re going.

More commonly, I do the earlier material first to collect sounds, instruments, chord progressions, and harmony bits. Once I have all that material gathered, then it’s time to write the big theme.

During that research phase, were there specific tracks, artists, or types of music that helped shape the skeleton of Dunk’s score?

For me, Tom Waits always looms so large. The way he uses percussion—especially on Swordfishtrombones and his later albums—is an omnipresent influence. The percussion on Arrival in Ashford is unquestionably influenced by that grungy, basement percussion sound.

Overall, navigating that narrow Venn diagram of “sounds like a Spaghetti Western, but exists in Westeros” was all the inspiration needed.

Coming from a rock background and pivoting into film scoring, what advice would you give to early-career musicians or those looking to make a similar shift to do it at a professional level?

When I talk to younger composers who say they want to do something very niche—like only scoring video games—I tell them to be a musician first. Learn every aspect of music-making you possibly can: engineering, mixing, mastering, songwriting, singing, playing instruments, orchestrating, arranging, copyist work, sheet music, editing, and stemming.

You don’t know what gigs will come your way, and you want to be able to say yes to anything cool that can progress your career. If a punk band asks you to arrange horns for their record and you turn it down because you only want to score films, you miss out. If you say yes, maybe that album blows up, you become a sought-after horn arranger, and someone hires you to score a film specifically for your horn work. Or maybe you just become an incredible arranger, and that’s great too. I set out to work in rock music, ended up in film scoring, and I’m so happy with how it went.

Watch A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on HBO Max. Follow Dan Romer on Instagram and X. Check out more of Dan’s work in Luca, Lilo and Stitch, Death of a Unicorn, and more.

For years, Dave Porter has crafted the exact sonic tension that keeps us anchored to our screens. If you’ve ever felt your heart race during Breaking Bad or found yourself pulled into the high-stakes momentum of The Blacklist, you’ve already experienced how his music carves out a story’s psychological skeleton and gives it a pulse. For his latest (multi-Emmy nominated) project, Pluribus, the narrative presents a unique challenge: how do you score the collision between a uniform hive mind and the messy, fragile individuality of the humans trying to survive it?

The answer requires throwing traditional cohesion out the window. When dealing with two opposite states of being, standard rules fall away. Porter found himself balancing small, intimate grief with world-ending horror using little more than a sparse nine-part choir and a starkly limited string section, proving that a restricted state of mind often demands restraint, not multi-instrumental orchestral breaks that blow your face off.

We dove into the terrifying process of crafting main title themes, why human vocal improvisation became the heart of the score, and the ultimate artistic lesson: the power of addition through subtraction.

We had a fantastic chat; I hope you check it out!

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

25F: I am really excited to talk about writing for characters in Pluribus, specifically Carol and Helen. With a score and storyline like this: how do you balance expressing the remnants of their individuality, specifically with characters like Helen, rather than the overarching collective theme of this two-dimensional hive mind?

Dave Porter: That is certainly one of the big challenges of the show: the hive mind is not black and white or two-dimensional. The whole concept Vince [Gilligan] is working on here is that it’s way more complicated and nuanced than that. As for our characters, they’re human and messy. Carol is a hero you want to root for, but she’s also very difficult at times. All of that works together to reinforce something I’ve always felt: musical themes are super powerful, but they have to be used really judiciously.

With a score where you have to balance a flatter nature regarding the collective, flatness of the hive mind with the human-ness of Carol and the people left with her, was it the type of thing where you felt you had to throw out the window the idea that all these songs have to go together or be somewhat cohesive, given that you’re talking about two opposite states of being?

The score had to be very nimble and flexible. It has to go to a lot of places—from gigantic, almost world-ending horror, to levity, loneliness, and isolation. It definitely has to adapt along the way.

I’m glad you mentioned the relationship between Carol and Helen. Even though Helen isn’t around too long in our storyline, at least so far, their interaction and relationship are massively important. Her death and our understanding of their relationship speak so importantly to how Carol reacts to the world she finds herself in.

One of the things I lean on in Pluribus is that when I think about thematic motifs, they tend to be more about relationships than individual characters. The music I wrote for Carol and Helen is an example of that. We make a point of bringing up its iterations at all kinds of moments, even when Helen isn’t there, to underscore the importance of their relationship and the weight it carries in our story. There are so many other examples, too.

When you get a script and read that the first death is the main character’s wife and manager, do you go in thinking, “Okay, this is going to be a fun one to mess around with a little,” given that unique relationship dynamic, or are you thinking, “Where do I even begin with this?”

I have been lucky enough to work with this crew, starting with Vince, for a very long time. If there is anything I have learned, it is not to expect anything. I’m always surprised and will continue to be surprised. That in itself is a fascinating creative challenge because you have to leave the door open. As I’m writing, I’m always thinking, “I don’t want to close too many doors, because I never know what’s coming next.”

I was reading about you working with limited strings and a nine-part choir and leaving it at that. Obviously, this isn’t your first rodeo scoring something as big as Pluribus, but with this specifically, is it harder to write something simple—meaning “two-dimensional” in the sense of the show itself? Is it hard to tackle because you’re still fulfilling the duty of something much bigger and complex, or is it simpler because there are fewer moving parts?

That’s a very interesting question. Honestly, I think it is harder to say what you want to say creatively with less. That is a skill I have worked on my whole career and still feel like I’m getting better at. It is something we value as a group, and I know Vince Gilligan values economy in what you’re saying, especially in a collaborative art like building a TV show.

I want to be as impactful as I can be while taking up as little oxygen as possible, leaving room for all these other incredibly gifted artists—from the actors to the writing, lighting, and editing. All of those things are important. One reason we’ve been collectively successful for all these years is our appreciation for where we want to live in the storytelling and where we want to make space for other people to shine. Working this way with this crew for so long has made me so much better at what I do.

Is it instinct in a case like this where you’re scoring for that two-dimensional aspect, where you add something and realize, “This is past the threshold of what I need to do—we need to keep it at its simplest step”?

Oh, yeah. That is one of the hardest lessons because it’s easy to pile on more stuff. Whatever you’re doing creatively—whether it’s music, writing a script or novel, or painting—human nature is to just do more. When actually, so many times, the more powerful answer is addition through subtraction. I’ll always try things, because you never know, but one of the skills I’ve learned as a composer over the years is knowing how to quickly identify when something is doing more than it needs to do.

Was there a specific scene or song where you were producing, stacking elements, and going through multiple iterations that just didn’t feel right until you finally got it in the end?

There were probably several important lightbulb moments and scenes during the show, but the biggest example is the main title theme. We spent months on that, and some of the early iterations were massive—huge pieces of music that encapsulated the scope and scale of our story. I found, without question, that it got better the less I tried to do with it. It has to say so many things in a small amount of time.

Crucially, the most important thing is its overall vibe and tone, rather than an overly complex melody—though hopefully we have a nice, catchy little melody in there.

You do get that!

It’s about creating a sense of something that immediately embodies the show. So if you’re in the other room making a burger and the show comes on, you hear that and know what show it is and what mindset you need to be in to watch it. Honestly, that came down to doing less. It’s literally a two-part vocal piece: one part is percussive and syncopated, and the other is a beautiful melody. Sometimes they work together, and sometimes they rub against each other musically. Very importantly, they’re sung by the same woman, representing two sides of the argument that forms the basis of what we hope people take from the show.

On a broader scale regarding your other work, do you find main title tracks require the most iterations, or do some click easily while others are tougher?

Main title themes for TV—which are unique to the medium—are one of the hardest jobs in our business, without question. They’re the ones that keep me up at night and have me curled up in a fetal position worrying, because they are really important and accomplish so much in a small space. At the same time, I love those challenges. The process of creating a main title theme so often helps me with the score as a whole. If you can distill what you’re trying to do into that short amount of time, the lessons you learn about what works and what doesn’t can be so informative for the series as a whole.

Is it always the first thing you do?

Interestingly, it is never the first thing, though it probably should be. I’ve found that I need to get into the show itself to truly understand and get it. In fact, because the first episode of Pluribus is such a massive standalone piece crucial to the whole story, it isn’t necessarily emblematic of the series as a whole. I needed to get a few episodes in just to get a handle on where we were going. I started thinking about the main title theme while working on the pilot, but I knew it was going to be more than that. That has been true for almost every series I’ve worked on.

Were there any weird instruments, samples, or objects you sampled that helped create the collective vibe the show is about?

For me, the central seed for the whole score is the vocals. It was a great challenge and a lot of fun to work with a small vocal ensemble and just experiment. I knew whatever we did wasn’t going to have recognizable words or big overarching melodies within the show that you’d easily click into. It was there for all the human texture it brings.

It was a big challenge because that isn’t something you can replicate with software. Credit to my producers for having the faith to let me experiment in the room with singers to find what worked. I had things written on the page, and while some made the final version, other elements were built on the fly in the room because my original thoughts didn’t feel right. That aspect of human improvisation and experimentation—individually and collectively—was built into my approach to the score and mirrors the symbolic themes of the show.

Stepping away from the score to music in general: if the Pluribus hive mind had to choose one song from any generation or era to convince humanity to give up free will, what would it be?

Wow. The irony of that is almost any piece of music you can think of was created by an individual or a very small group of people.

I was wondering if you were going to mention that, because I wasn’t sure if it was possible to answer.

Even something like “We Are the World” was ultimately written by individuals. That would be a huge quandary for the hive mind. They have an appreciation for things made by individuals, but they can’t comprehend doing it themselves. That’s one of the fascinating things about Pluribus that I hope generates conversation. What is the role of the individual versus the collective in art?

Making a TV show is a collaborative art done together, but it’s the sum of individual voices. I bring my whole history in music; Jennifer Bryan brings her whole history of costume design. That amalgamation of individuals makes it powerful. But at the same time, we need each other, and we need an audience to interpret the art and form their own individual interpretations. That is such an important conversation to have in our world today, and I love how Pluribus gets people talking about it.

If you have any advice for people interested in scoring and sound design for film and TV, what would you tell them?

Do it. Get out there and do it. What’s amazing now compared to when I started is that the tools are accessible and readily available on your computer to practice with. You could take Pluribus, strip the audio out, and score it yourself. That’s how you learn through practice, experimentation, and trial.

Of course, musical skills are important to learn where you can, but everyone has those to varying degrees. Honestly, it’s about learning through practice how to find a voice unique to you. Unlike making a pop record, you are serving a larger collaborative goal—a film, TV show, theater production, or modern dance. Learn the language, learn through experience what works for you, and go with your gut.

Watch Season 1 of Pluribus on Apple TV. Follow Dave Porter on Instagram.

When Rico Nasty first appears onscreen for our call, she’s cornered by a legion of figurines varying in shape, size, and species watching over the rapper, singer, actor extraordinaire like baby bounty hunters. Instead of ordering their fire over the opposition (myself, the interviewer), she is insistent on introducing me to every one of them, lending a steady pan of the camera to reveal collectibles, Smiskis, figurines, and her prized Kewpie Baby, which was gifted to her by a fan. Whimsy seems to be at the forefront of it all, though her art has not always reflected such cases; tracks about “smacking bitches,” being a well-known example, which, in fairness, she raps about being relieved she does not have to do! Case in point, or storyline aside, Rico carries a clear, considerate, and energetic disposition at the forefront of her presence. There’s a clear love for the game, although her career, versatile and colorful as it might seem, has often found itself overlooked, undermined, and misunderstood, not from a place of ambiguity, but one of sexism, misogyny, and ill-informed consumers with a cis-het-male-centric expectation.

Rx, Rico’s latest catalog installation, reads to me as a checkpoint wherein the haters of Rico Nasty’s past have finally caught up with a talent that’s BEEN existing right in front of their faces for years. Let me be clear: this is not a record that sonically replicates previous bodies of hers to a T. Rather, it’s one with new ambitions from a brand new Rico persona evolution. The only constant in this equation is the unabashed freedom to create and talent that, when mentioning it aloud, renders itself redundant because of just how apparent it is. With a Hayley Williams cosign (and opening slot later this year), there’s no room to deny the reign that not only grows stronger, but grows anew and different every time.

This was a dream conversation, and I cannot believe I got to have this chat on my very own publication. I am humbled and freaking out. MARYLAND GIRLS DO IT BEST!!!!

I hope you give it a read.

25F: How are you?

Rico Nasty: I’m good. How are you?

I’m doing well. Thanks so much for hopping on. Where are you calling in from today?

I’m home. I don’t know what room this is—I’m still putting it together, so there’s no bed in here yet.

I love all of the little gizmos and gadgets you have up there. I love the little baby.

The Kewpie baby was actually a gift from one of the fans on tour. A lot of these are gifts from fans on tour.

I love it. Well, I want to start—kind of selfishly as a fellow Marylander myself—by asking you a bit about the DMV, if that’s okay. I’m from Annapolis, in Anne Arundel County. Not PG, but close by.

No way—I didn’t know you were a Marylander!

Not quite PG County, but I’m in Anne Arundel! Right next door.

I say what I say about PG County because I’m biased, but I love the whole DMV.

Yeah, I’m in Annapolis right now.

Are you near the Arundel Mills mall?

Yes, literally 25 minutes away.

I always think of Medieval Times whenever I think of that place. I loved it there so much.

Funny story: I went to Medieval Times with my dad when I was about seven, and I was such a coward halfway through. I was like, “Oh my god, the whips are so loud, I have to leave.” I was on the black and white team, asking to leave so we could go to Bass Pro Shop instead.

Yes! That big Bass Pro Shop. That’s so nostalgic.

Talk to me a bit about what the young PG County girl reclaimed with this record. You bring that energy into all your projects, but what specifically are you tapping into for this one?

I feel like I’m stepping fully into confidence. Obviously, I’ve always had confidence, but this is just how I feel right now. You know how when you meet someone from New York, you can always tell where they’re from because they’re so proud? That’s how I wear my city. I rep PG County. That’s my New York. I love it there.

How did growing up in PG County equip you to handle a much bigger, global stage than where you started?

I’ve always had super big dreams and thought highly of myself, even as a kid. I’m happy I did, because confidence isn’t just about loving how you look; it’s about trusting the decisions you make and the people you surround yourself with. Confidence is everything wrapped into one. The minute my confidence was attacked early on, it started affecting other areas of my life. On this long journey of finding out who I am, I’ve realized confidence is the number one thing that keeps you going. It keeps you in a state of self-belief where nobody can mess with you.

It’s delusion until you make it true—and at this point, it’s completely true. And that starts at home in the DMV.

Yeah, because it’s a very blunt, open-minded place. It’s hard to hold your tongue in the DMV; people say what they mean, and you aren’t guaranteed an apology. Growing up there taught me to be myself and stand firm, because it doesn’t matter what anyone has to say about you. I grew up in the hood, in the trenches. Was I weird? Yes, I was still weird. But people respected me because they couldn’t push me past my boundaries. They couldn’t put a battery in my back or force me into something outside my vision. They knew I had a mind of my own.

Absolutely.

They knew I was my own person, and I put that entirely on confidence. When you grow up in the DMV, people love to joke and talk trash. I remember people roasting each other in the hallways all day. Growing up around that, you learn how to take a joke and hold your own.

Everything is fair game for a joke.

Exactly.

It’s so refreshing to hear that perspective. How do you describe that distinct DMV mix of sweetness, toughness, and individual style to someone who’s never been here?

It’s hard to describe because so many staples originated with us, even if other cities adopted them later. Take New Balance, for instance. My mom is a born-and-raised New Yorker from Brooklyn. When I came home from school asking for 990s, people in New York were wearing Jordans and calling 990s “dad shoes” or orthopedic sneakers. This was way before Balenciaga and designer high-tops. Then Lil Uzi started wearing them, and suddenly people associated them with Philly.

Right.

Another major staple is CDG Foams, also the premise of the track on the record. Foamposites are a DMV rite of passage. That is our shoe, through and through, regardless of who else wore them. People in our area stood outside in lines for them, and people lost their lives over them. Galaxy Foams—that whole sneaker culture is ours. KDs, Mambas—we’ve always been stylish, but our influence often gets overlooked. Similar to my career [laughs]—overlooked, copied, but still standing strong.

Let them know!

The confidence remains the same. The DMV remains the same at its core. If you know, you know.

What I love about your trajectory beyond your roots by geography is that you evolve on your own terms for the sake of the art. As I’m sure you’re painfully aware, women, people of color, and queer artists in the music industry are often forced into boxes where they’re expected to reinvent themselves every year or two. How have you maintained that self-trust through all the industry pressure?

By realizing you can’t trust anyone.

Say more.

At the end of the day, you’re the one performing the songs, answering the interview questions, and carrying the era for a year or more. You’re the one keeping the vision alive. It goes far beyond other people’s opinions. Confidence means knowing you picked the right direction and being willing to defend it. In the past, there were times when I knew exactly what record my fans wanted to hear, but my confidence got clouded by industry veterans who had been in the game for ten-plus years telling me what to do.

Yeah.

They’d bring up all the big artists they worked with, but none of that matters because you aren’t those other artists.

Right.

You can either look at it like the glass is half empty and complain that you aren’t getting that same blueprint, or you can say, “I love who I am, and I’m good at what I do. What works for them doesn’t work for me.” That’s hard to navigate in an industry built on quick money and cash-grab trends. It’s why I don’t really do features anymore.

Makes sense.

I’m very anti-system right now because I want to see how far I can push my boundaries. It’s like when I was in school wearing uniforms—I always wanted to see how far I could tweak the uniform until it wasn’t a uniform anymore. When you have the confidence to say, “I don’t want to be that specific type of famous,” it throws people off. Labels wonder, “What did we sign you for then?”

On Rx, especially on Kiss N Make Up, you confront different sides of your personality fighting with one another. Was there a specific version of yourself that was the hardest to make peace with over the last few years or during the creation of this record?

Yes bro—Rico Nasty herself. I’ve always created different characters, but at one point, I felt a total disconnect. It felt like Rico Nasty became this corporate character dictated by label opinions on how I should look or act. It turned into an out-of-body experience, like flying in a plane with no pilot and no way to get down. It was terrifying because I was losing alignment with my own work.

Yeah.

The only way back to myself was to hit the pause button. I tend to overthink and overwork. When I first started making music, it was so effortless because I just said whatever I wanted. Eventually, the mindset shifted to, “All these people are watching, so you need to say the right things.” But why should I feel responsible for pleasing strangers?

Did you feel like you had an obligation to separate Maria Kelly from Rico Nasty, or did it make more sense to merge them as one?

I had to merge them.

Was that a difficult process?

To an extent. I’m the same person, but when I first blew up, I was going through a tough period of self-acceptance. I had just had my son and felt judged by people around me. When music took off, Rico Nasty became a scapegoat. It was an excuse to say, “I don’t have to be Maria anymore—she made mistakes, so let’s hide her.” That was a defense mechanism. Looking back, I’m actually glad I didn’t expose my raw, vulnerable self to the industry early on, because a lot of environments back then were toxic. But once you get praise for a persona, you fear going back to being regular. Regular means wearing my natural hair with no eyeliner and a pimple patch. I’m not perfect, and trying to project perfection constantly is exhausting. As I got older, I realized I needed to embrace Maria Kelly again. She’s cool, and I protect her now.

How has that idea of self-preservation evolved compared to the earlier stages of your career?

Early on, I was definitely showing out and acting wild—around 23 or 24. I could be completely in the wrong and not care because I knew people would defend me regardless. But that power can warp you if you aren’t careful. Eventually, I looked at some of the things I was saying online and realized, “You sound crazy. You shouldn’t talk to people like that.” At the time, roasting people felt harmless, but boasting about money when people are genuinely struggling isn’t cool. Once you reach a point where you realize you actually made it out, you develop empathy. People might talk trash online, but that’s often all they have going on. Realizing that changed my perspective. You get a grace period early in your career to be chaotic, but eventually, you have to mature and protect your peace.

Speaking of growth and reconnecting with your core collaborators, what was it like getting back in the studio with Kenny Beats for this project? What kind of real talk did he give you during those sessions?

He’s constantly roasting me. I don’t know why people think he’s so nice—he’s so mean to me [laughs].

We’re going to put him on blast and tag him everywhere.

No, it’s funny because Kenny rarely gives straight-up compliments—or if he does, it’s always in the past tense!

Is that dynamic almost a secret superpower? Having someone constantly challenging you to push past your limits? Or just roasting the shit out of you for the love of the game.

Maybe that’s what it is. From the very beginning of our work together, I wanted to experiment with rock and push beyond traditional hip-hop boundaries. We both push each other in unique ways.

How so?

I’ve always admired how he can navigate both rap and rock spaces seamlessly, collaborating with notable rock figures. Meanwhile, he loves being grounded in the rap space as a core producer duo. We are at our best when we work together, even if we resist that narrative sometimes. For me, it was tricky because people kept saying, “You only make your best music with Kenny.” That bothered me because I felt tracks like “Son of a Gun” showed so much growth beyond Anger Management. But that high bar forces us to deliver every single time. Neither of us wants to let the quality drop.

It’s a double-edged sword—I’ll release something I’m proud of, and people immediately compare it to “Smack a Bitch,” which was one of my earliest tracks. It can feel like people overlook how much I’ve evolved, but not knowing what people want from me ultimately keeps me creative. I’m not here to cater to expectations.

Yeah.

I’ve been doing this for a while now, and I don’t feel obligated to follow a playbook. People are going to tune in regardless, which is a great position to be in.

Well, you definitely stepped further into the rock space and landed the tour opening for Hayley Williams; what was that reaction like?

I was like, “Don’t play with me!” Every time I’ve gone on tour with someone, it came from a direct invitation from the artist. You don’t submit an application for that. People online were asking, “How did she get on that tour?” The answer is simple: the headliner liked my music.

Imagine that—an artist being a genuine fan. It’s so funny how difficult a concept that is for some people to wrap their heads around.

Exactly! You’d be surprised how many of your favorite artists are actual fans. When my team brought up the possibility over dinner, I told them, “Don’t pitch me this fun idea unless it’s actually happening, because Hayley Williams is a dream tour for me.” A few days later, they confirmed Hayley specifically wanted me on the bill. I had posters of her on my wall growing up; I used to draw her in my sketchbooks. Accepting that offer was a massive moment for me. It validated everything—having an icon who has sustained a 15-plus-year career acknowledge my work made me feel like, “Okay, they really see and hear what I’m doing.”

Looking at your journey, your evolution, and the scope of Rx—where the ‘X’ symbolizes infinity—what do you want your ultimate legacy to convey?

When I face setbacks, there are two main sources of motivation I reflect on. The first is my son. I’ve heard a lot of “no’s” in this industry and faced plenty of doors being shut in my face. I want my son to look back at everything I navigated and see my humor, perseverance, and ability to stay present as a parent through it all. Failing isn’t an option when it comes to him. Providing for him and being there for him keeps me grounded.

The second influence—on a totally different spectrum—is Joan Jett. She has one of the most powerful presences in rock history. Her vocal delivery transcends traditional gender expectations in music, which heavily inspired me to aim for a distinct, undeniable vocal style. When you read her history—getting turned down by labels, facing harsh crowds on tour, and constantly fighting for her spot—it puts temporary struggles into perspective. She went on to write timeless classics and enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It proves that temporary noise doesn’t matter; what matters is your commitment to the art and how you stand at the end of the journey.

Beyond the cycles of fashion, acting, and music releases, what makes you proudest of who you are right now in this exact moment?

Integrating Maria with Rico Nasty. Because I did that internal work, my confidence comes entirely from within now. Right now, people are enjoying the music, but I loved it before it was even released. Maintaining that internal happiness is what Rx is all about—confidence to infinity.

When people asked why I made a track like Frenzy, my response was, “Why not?” I wanted to jump into that sound space and deliver something fresh for my fans. I don’t care about box-checking or industry categories. Some critics try to dismiss my rap credentials by labeling me strictly a “rock star,” but then I rap circles around people and shift the conversation again. The entire point of this project is showing that I can do it all on my own terms—no features, no major label restrictions, no rules. Art is ultimately between the artist and the fans who show up for the shows. That mindset is what gives an artist real longevity, and I plan on performing well into my 40s and beyond.

Listen to Rx on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Rico Nasty on Instagram and TikTok.

For years, Josh Karpeh, better known as Cautious Clay, operated as music’s stealthily influential architect. He was the multi-instrumentalist who could, and continues to, bridge the gap between hip-hop, electronic, and alt-R&B, swapping studio sessions with everyone from Saba and Remi Wolf to Kavinsky, all while keeping his own face slightly out of the blinding glare of full-blown celebrity. He was never interested in being a tabloid sex symbol or playing the exhausting game of internet clout. Rather, he just wanted the music to sit heavy in your chest.

Still, as he completes his Hours trilogy, the page is turning, and while the saga nears its completion, the stakes of a workflow continue to evolve. Gone is the self-imposed pressure of rigid perfectionism or the claustrophobia of being locked in a studio 24/7. Trading the hyper-speed energy of New York for the grounded tempo of Philly—and picking up paintbrushes and basketballs along the way—Karpeh has tapped into an entirely new frequency of creative freedom. He’s no longer chasing the music; rather, he is living a life rich enough to let the art spill out on his own accord.

On the trilogy’s latest and penultimate installation, Karpeh leaves the safety of the dark. Bypassing the sappy, soft-lit morning and the indulgent, secretive night, he sets his sights on the midday—that exposed, shadowless 1:00 PM limbo where there’s nowhere left to hide. Sonically, he’s trading soft acoustic cushions for raw reggae-infused rhythms, thick rock-tinged basslines, and direct lyricism that cuts straight through the noise. It’s the sound of an individual who is wholly unbothered by industry positioning, confident in his taste, and hyper-focused on his own genius.

I caught up with Josh to talk about moving to Philly, shedding perfectionism, navigating high-noon vulnerability, and why he’ll always choose genuine human connection over the mirage of being “cool.” Dream convo unlocked...I hope you enjoy.

25F: You’ve been moving back and forth between Philly and Brooklyn—how did changing your physical environment alter the tempo of your songwriting or production?

Cautious Clay: Honestly, it changed it for the better. I got into painting and basketball, and that was really impactful for my creative process. There was sort of a difference in tempo and energy that I was experiencing in Philly versus in New York.

How did those sorts of boundaries and escapes help you feel freer to produce? Sometimes people say that those escapes are distractions, but it sounds like here these separations made you feel a little freer about what you’re creating.

It’s very important, I think, to have other things that inform the creative process. Maybe in the beginning stages for a lot of artists, or for people when they’re first starting something, it’s nice to just really lock in on that one thing. I still subscribe to that in a way, but I think now it’s just easier to tap in and out of those emotional states when I need them.

I would say inspiration, curiosity, and creativity all come from a place of actually just living life, instead of thinking, “I need to produce,” you know? Which might be true in a lot of ways, but I find it to be more interesting to just have to experience life and have it inform the art and the music. If you’re not breaking up the monotony of whatever you’re doing, I think that the creativity will suffer as a result.

With having those different parts of your life—between recording for a specific amount of time and then going and doing other things like that—do you find that you were editing your songs less and just letting them flow out? Or was it something where you were just trusting your first instincts more and just going with it?

I think that my ability to create has always been very natural. Whether it’s good or bad is something that I consider later, because I’m very stubborn about my creativity. I’ll just keep chasing it until I feel like it’s good enough. But I definitely think my desire to be a perfectionist has gone out the window.

When I’m working solo, it’s kind of just like, cool, let me just think of something that I like, and once that happens, it’s undoubtedly going to be interesting or cool. Whether or not it comes out is really just dependent upon what the themes are of what I’m trying to express.

With this Hours concept, I had a very clear motive to just make something that felt like the afternoon—what felt like a midday or what felt like a certain type of focus. Unapologetic creativity is one of my strongest attributes. I’m very good at responding, being non-judgmental of myself, and embracing whatever comes that day.

At one point you described the midday or high noon as sort of “nebulous.” I’m curious what makes 12:00 PM or 1:00 PM something harder to pin down than something like, say, midnight or 1:00 AM.

I think at that time of day, it’s time to focus, or at least be more grounded. I think there’s less opportunity to wander. It’s somewhere between being sleepy and calm, and being hyper-energized and excited. I think the energy is just nebulous and thick.

When I think of nighttime, I know I’m definitely a night person. If I’m being honest, I relate more to the night portion of this album than I do to the morning. I know what the morning feels like, and I can tap into that emotionally, but emotionally, I might be more connected to the nighttime.

The afternoon feels a little bit different. It’s a time when I’m in the zone. I feel like the energy is more based around productivity, or maybe just based around this element of getting through something, whether it’s work, socialization, or whatever.

A shadowless environment is how I pictured it. I feel like the midday also feels very exposed, you know. Was there any really vulnerable and exposed lyric on this record specifically that really sticks with you? Do you feel like this is the most exposed record of the three in this segment?

That’s a great question. I feel like the night is probably not as exposed, but more indulgent. The morning is a little bit more sappy, a little bit softer.

I think this word “exposed” is actually great. “Ivy,” for example, is a pretty direct, raw song, describing a situation that’s very clear. There’s a desire for less ambivalence and more verity about how time is being used.

There are other songs on the record which are sonically like reggae and upbeat. The morning felt a little bit more upbeat, and the afternoon was also upbeat, but maybe there’s a little bit more to it. For some reason, reggae always just felt like midday to me.

I was going to ask about that. I was curious why reggae felt like a good vehicle for the midday frame of mind.

It just feels like happy music to me. There’s also a lot of character to it with the rhythms. I think it’s one of those genres where I’ve just never heard of someone being like, “I don’t like reggae,” you know?

When it comes to the afternoon, it feels like a vehicle that offers that kind of “let’s get through this” energy. It’s not like acoustic guitars and soft, but it’s also not like party time. It’s that middle, nebulous feeling that you mentioned earlier.

When you’re in the studio making something like that, where it feels like it can continue to build and you can enjoy the building process, I’m curious if through the time of making this trilogy saga, your definition of what a finished song sounds like has evolved between then and now.

Maybe a little bit, but generally no. I put out so much music that I feel like my relationship to what is finished and what is not hasn’t changed, but my confidence in my sound is definitely much more defined.

I was reading your bio ahead of this interview, and I was curious about the label of being “quietly influential.” I was watching an interview a while ago with Marina Diamandis, and she was talking about being successful through the back door as something good, but also a strange thing to reckon with. Does that concept of being quietly influential resonate with you, or does it ever feel reductive?

I get recognized maybe like three times a month in random situations—at the grocery store, or some random person on the street. It happens, and it’s always really nice and flattering, but also sometimes I’m just like, hm, this is real and totally surreal.

“Quietly influential” is an interesting descriptor because I definitely feel that way, but I also feel like I was very intentional about how I navigated things from the get-go. I never wanted to be defined by anything other than my music, and because I made that choice, it feels like that’s what the result is. I became famous or had some level of connection to people that was really just about the music. A lot of people don’t even know what I look like or know things about me, but they love my music.

As an artist, you just respond to how people connect to you. I knew from the start that for myself, I didn’t want to be known for my relationships or my appearance. Those are all things that have informed my situation.

You’ve got an insane and very notable list of collaborators in your career from 2017 up until this. With all of those in mind, and also talking about that sort of quiet influence, how does it affect your view on your placement in the indie R&B scene in general when you have these pop giants pulling from your sound?

Honestly, I think people just don’t know where to put me. I’ve known the coolest of cool R&B people, and I’ve known the poppiest of pop people. It puts me in this weird position where people are just like, “Oh, we fuck with you, but where do you fit?”

Is that challenging, or is that something that you’re stoked about?

It can be challenging, yeah, because I’m a very tasteful guy. I don’t just do things for the sake of it. I’ll meet with somebody who’s super poppy, but I’m not like, Oh my god, let me just do this because it’ll get me a lot of notoriety. I’ll just do something that I like and try my best to fill in that space where I know I can connect.

From a creative standpoint, I truly believe that I have a lot to offer. I didn’t go into making music to be a top artist, and I don’t regret that for a second. I have met and worked with a lot of other artists, and I think I have a lot to offer them creatively that a lot of people don’t know.

Also, yes, I am a musician, but I went to school for international affairs. I’m pretty well-educated and have a lot of different thoughts and understandings of the world, but I don’t advertise that. It’s a part of my story, but I think it really just informs my creative path and what I can steward with my relationships in general.

Back to your point, though, everyone is so cagey about where to put it. I’ve done songs with a lot of different types of artists—in the electronic scene, the hip-hop scene, and the indie scene. It’s a weird kind of place to be, but I embrace it. I try my best not to take anything personally, because none of it is personal at all. We’re all just creating our little worlds and trying to be the best versions of ourselves that we can. So I’m just going to keep doing that, keep creating, keep collaborating, and see where that takes me.

With how the music industry, specifically in the streaming world, has shifted, what has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned about surviving the modern landscape?

Just embracing different things, like taking meetings with people that maybe I’m not totally sure I align with. Because at the end of the day, there are levels to this. It’s not like I’m meeting with the Heritage Foundation, you know what I mean? Will I have a meeting with Diplo or work with some artist that maybe I don’t really see as a typical Cautious Clay record? There’s no harm. If all I’m doing is building relationships with people that maybe I don’t necessarily always see eye to eye with, I know at least it’s not about something that is fundamental to who I am. I know my boundaries around that.

In the creative space, it’s just really hard because a lot of people get caught up with positioning, where they’re like, “Oh, well, is this person cool enough?” and I’m like, I don’t fucking care. I’m just trying to really connect in a way that feels genuine and with creative people.

Now that this Hours trilogy is at this point where it’s almost completely out, if you could take all of the trilogy and hand it to a 2017 Josh, what track might shock him the most and why?

I think the song that would shock me most is “Shoulders.” I’d look at that one and be like, Hell yeah, this is sick.

Do you find that’s because it’s a lot different from what you were making then to what you’re making now?

Well, I don’t know if it’s different, but it’s exactly the type of music I want to make. It’s a perfect combination of pop, rock, and R&B, which are the three pillars for me.

Now that this saga is almost completely closed, once it’s dropped, what is the “25th hour” going to look like in terms of your career and what the music is going to sound like?

I think I want to collaborate a lot more and have some fun traveling for different projects. I’m also thinking about the next project being focused on my painting and sort of merging those worlds a little bit. I’m already kind of working and making new music with artists that I like and people that I’m excited to be with. I’ll be doing a lot of traveling and planning around that.

Listen to The Hours: High Noon out Friday, July 31 on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Cautious Clay on Instagram.

When you have literal titans like Erykah Badu, Lorde, and Justin Bieber singing your praises, and peers like Kevin Abstract acting as mentors and cheerleaders pushing you out of your comfort zone, you have no choice but to lock the fuck in. Indeed, this is the case for my most recent guest Love Spells, the stage moniker of Sir Taegen Harris, who has never taken the merits of these cosigns for granted. All that said, he’s still growing rapidly, and very much within his own lane.

For a while, it seemed Harris was boxed into the “slow, sad, and melancholy” category by early listeners. Early on, there was a mysteriousness to his character, his face often a rarity in visual representations of past works whose “genre” accumulated heavily into the “somber-pop-singer-songwriter” corner of the industry. The page, however, has since blown over, trading enigma-indie-pop for, in his own words, pure, unfiltered flamboyance. With this, he makes it clear as day that with this leap ahead, the separation between the artist on stage and the person off it has completely vanished. Love Spells is Sir Taegen Harris, and thank goodness for that.

For his upcoming record, Love is the Law, we are met with a crucial declaration that romance isn’t just a choice; it is a strict lifestyle requirement. Musically, Taegen slings the heavy walls of bedroom-pop reverb out the back window. Instead, he’s putting his vocals directly in your face with a newfound soulful grit, with vocals that act like instrumentals, and instrumentals that will make you realize “damn, we’re eating GOOD today.” These tracks are meant for breaking free, sharing an intimate slow-dance with the love of your life, or losing your mind in a blaring loud club with high-heel-demonia stompers that are actively slipping and sticking to liquor-clad floors.

I am genuinely obsessed and blown away by everything Taegen is doing nowadays. Dive into our convo below; it was truly such a special one!

25F: I was reading some of your interviews from previous album cycles in preparation for this, and I read something interesting that wasn’t connected to this album specifically. You said that your favorite quote was “to live and die with romance.” I was really interested because that wasn’t directly about this album, but it also feels very connected to the ultimate thesis of the record. Do you think that romance is a choice or a requirement for you in your life?

Love Spells: A requirement, always. I think it should be a requirement in everyone’s lives. Things like romance make your life more interesting and fun to live. A lot of people forget this, but it’s not even just a thing between two people. You should always share that romance with yourself as well. Even simply taking a walk when you usually wouldn’t, stepping out of your comfort zone to be put into a new situation, or just going to the beach and hanging out by yourself.

Even things as mundane as instead of being on your phone all day, picking up a book now and then and exploring different worlds in that way. Things that make you think more and make you feel more that contribute to a more interesting and romantic life.

When I think of romance in the confines of law, as the title suggests, I feel like it implies boundaries or rules. What are the rules, if any, in correlation to romance that govern both your personal life and also within the music that you’re making?

I think there’s only one rule, and it’s in the title of the album: live your life with romance and love, and hold that to a high standard. I think that helps everything, honestly.

I have this thing I do where I like to ask my friends who are in relationships if they slow dance with their partners. I’m a huge slow-dance and general dancing enthusiast in all forms. Sharing something close and intimate like that, so many things can go through your mind. It’s almost like meditating together and gaining another level of appreciation and connection. I like to ask that because I feel as if people around me sometimes forget the importance of those things—living without romance, love, or even just being nice and kind to each other and expressing appreciation. Leading and living by that love—to me, I think it is the law. A lot of people and a lot of things would be a bit better if more people led with that.

What is it about the energy of slow dancing specifically that gives you that more romantic feeling than, say, being with somebody with blaring loud music in a club where you’re face-to-face but in a more constant state of motion?

I don’t think there’s a difference at all, actually. It’s crazy you say that because tonight I’m going to a place I go every Monday and Thursday to dance. It is a blaring, loud club, but it’s one of the few places I know where people actually dance and break free in that way. I’ve danced with people before, and it’s more like slow dancing to me, honestly, with the intimacy. It’s still very close, especially in the way that I dance.

When you’re dancing in a club versus when you’re on stage, and you’re dancing with the crowd, do you feel like you’re dancing for them, or do you feel like you’re trying to invite them into a private moment where you also just happen to be dancing in front of them?

I think it’s not private at all, actually. There’s nothing private about dancing. You can’t ever hide it; it’s so honest and so real. If anything, it’s one of the most exposing things you can do.

On stage, I feel more free in the way that I won’t dance unless I genuinely feel like it. If I go on stage one day and I’m like, you know what? I don’t feel like it, I just won’t do it. It’s so emotion-based for me. I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to have a relationship with dancing that feels performative and not true or raw to me. But then again, I always feel compelled to dance, so that probably will never happen. I more so do it in the way that hopefully will invite people and have them feel what I’m feeling the same way, because if you don’t care, they won’t care. A lot of people forget that you’re supposed to show them what to do.

So that decision is never based on what the crowd seems to be wanting?

It’s entirely how I’m feeling. They’re here to see me anyway, so I’m gonna be both. That’s always the case, even with me speaking on stage or talking. I know sometimes I’ll just start singing things in a low voice and just having fun.

For a while, you had a lot of people say that you make solely slow and sad music, which I think with this record you’ve made very clear that’s a claim you reject. Was it daunting at all to step out of that zone of melancholy and demand that your audience let go and dance to have a good time, even though that is what you’re known for?

To be honest, it was actually not scary at all. It was actually so easy. Very easy.

That’s really great to hear. I can imagine it was very freeing getting out of a box you didn’t even make for yourself.

It was very freeing because during that time, I stopped being insecure in myself in that way. I don’t really have those thoughts anymore. So when I did start doing it, I was like, okay, well, I guess I’m doing it. It felt fun, and it was a cool experiment to do. Even in the studio now, I’m still trying to figure out more ways to expand on that and show this other side of myself. When it came about, I was never scared. I was more so just so excited to get into it. The excitement was too big for me to think about anything else.

Did that shift feel like you were merging your stage self as Love Spells and yourself as Sir Taegen Harris into one person? Or did you still feel like there’s a distinct separation, and if so, where is that line drawn now versus in past cycles?

That’s a good question. I never get nervous on stage anymore because there’s no separation.

I went from being so mysterious and closed off to being as flamboyant as possible, but then again, it was just showing people me. There’s a huge transition, even in the way I dress, my hair, everything. There’s nothing to hide. I go on stage, and people are there to see me regardless, and that’s a beautiful thing because it doesn’t make me nervous to be myself.

Of course, it’s a lot of people watching me, but there are two tricks to that. One, I’m so blind that I can’t see them. Two, I feel like I’ve become so safe and comfortable in being crazy. In middle school and throughout my life, I feel like I’ve always been so flamboyant. As people are looking at me more now, it’s not even that crazy to me.

Did those nerves in the past come mostly from having that separation between your stage name and your personal self that you’ve since made amends with?

Yeah, honestly, it’s exactly that. I almost felt like I was lying to an extent because, of course, those things were still me, but not entirely. As I was changing, I developed a strong belief that your music should change with you. I’m becoming more confident, more flamboyant, and more of myself, so the music should reflect that. If I stayed there and kept making the same type of music, it would just not be true, and it wouldn’t be real. I honestly think it would not have turned as many heads as the music I’ve been dropping now. It would not have done what I needed it to do. I would be in a box, frozen in time and place.

With the transition into this new project, I think people are going to be talking about the transition with your voice as your primary instrument. What did you discover during this whole process about using your voice as a tool that maybe you were holding back in past cycles?

I never sang in such a soulful way on any of my songs before until now. I remember some of my producers, Joey, Danny, and I were making “Keep It to Yourself,” and when I started singing in the way that I do on that song, Danny was like, “Oh man, that’s the tone that we needed. I’ve never heard you sing like that before; that’s what we need to start doing.” When he said that, I was like, “I have it?” I really didn’t know.

From the very first song, it’s all very different. I’ve never done anything like it before. I’ve just discovered that I can use every part of my voice and not just this one part because I’ve only been making those slow, melancholy tunes.

That song in particular (Keep It To Yourself), I remember hearing the first note, and you get that sort of “stank face” where you’re just like, fuck, this is some soul-digging stuff. I wanted to throw that out there because you put such an emphasis on soul, and in listening to the rest of this record, it is at such a new forefront here. It is so clearly a vocal album.

I think it is more of a vocal album because I literally said I don’t want to be so drowned in reverb and stuff anymore. I want to push things to the front and keep it raw. As I’m becoming this new version of myself, that’s just a change that I’ve been wanting to make.

Seeing as it’s so individual now, if you look back at all the collabs you’ve done with Ian (Kevin Abstract) and things like Blush, how do you keep your own singular version of yourself and differentiate the collaborative Love Spells versus the individual Love Spells in a creative process like that without letting the two seep?

It’s a good question, actually. I had this problem when I first started making the album. I was like, what version of myself do I do? Who do I become? Because on one hand, like with Blush, the people I was working with were like, “Oh, you should try rapping,” and I was like, “I don’t know.” Then I wondered if I should switch it up and go electronic, or maybe make a rock album. There were just so many different phases of myself during that time with all these features.

But I also think that’s the beauty of it all. I see it like wearing different pairs of boots or shoes. If I’m going to go hiking, I’m going to wear this pair of boots. If I’m going dancing, I’m going to wear my dancing boots. I think of it like that instead of separating it for myself in that way. I still own all these shoes, and I really like them all.

Is that deliberation process of what version of yourself you want to bring out a stressful one, or is it subtly exciting knowing that you realistically have the tools to do any of those styles?

I feel like I’m so comfortable with myself now that it’s never a question about it. If it calls for it, I’ll do it. It’s as simple as that.

When you have massive champions like Erykah Badu, Justin Bieber, and Lorde saying such great things about your music, does it at all alleviate any remaining self-doubt that you might have, or is it a new type of pressure to deliver? Or is it neither of those things and just the coolest thing ever?

All of the above. I hear these things, and then I’m like, “Whoa, I’m already dropping stuff they like.” But then those artists also never just stuck to one thing in that way. So this is where I magnify myself and think about where to branch off. But again, that just leads me back to what I was saying earlier: I’m only going to do different things when I feel different, following myself in my own growth. I pray that I’m continuously growing so I’m not stuck in one place. But it’s beautiful to have those people like my music. It does make me more confident. I mean, Erykah Badu, you just say the name, and you’re like, “Okay, well, if she likes it, dude...”

You’ve also got peers within this industry like Ian (Kevin Abstract) and Dominic Fike who put “Crutch” on the radio before you even knew it was going to drop. What’s it like to have friends in the industry who believe so much in your music, maybe even before you do, or who force you to share it with the world?

Honestly, it’s exactly as you said it. Ian, for example, believed in everything that I’m doing now before I even did it. He and Ameer (Vann) were like mentors in the way of telling me to be more of myself. I was myself around them all the time, and they were like, “I want to see more of that everywhere else.”

It’s crazy because these people are always telling you that you’re going to be a star. It made me lock in. These people are right; you need to be as true to yourself as possible and open up. If you’re being received well in these spaces, that means something, and that means you have something. So you should ride with what you have and continue to be yourself.

You’ve also supported Dominic Fike and Sharon Van Etten, which are two very different crowds. What do you find that you learn from adapting your energy to different crowds when you’re supporting two different artists who are equally exciting in their own spaces?

You know what’s so funny? I didn’t change a single thing. All of my Sharon shows were the same as I’d perform anywhere else, and people still loved it. That’s what I meant earlier about not getting nervous on stage. You go on stage to be yourself and showcase yourself in that way. I never really changed it up at all, honestly. I’d come up after the show and people would be like, “Oh, I liked when you talked, I loved the energy.” That’s what’s beautiful about it to me. I never have to change and I never will for the circumstances, because why would I?

On more of a crowd magnitude standpoint, when you’re starting in more intimate venues, and then you’re going broader and bigger to things like Lollapalooza and All Things Go, are there ways that you feel like you adapt to the magnitude of the people you’re performing to? Does the physical space on the stage prompt you to dance more, or is it still this constant “this is who I am regardless of circumstance, so this is what you’re gonna get”?

The space on the stage is one thing I’m particularly excited about. I guarantee people are going to see faces of me that they’ve never seen in that way if I have the space to do whatever I want. I just feel like I’m going to be completely absurd. I go to the dance studio almost every day and just move around with all the energy that I have. Putting that on a huge stage is going to be insane, and I’m so excited because I get to be crazy. I can do the splits, a backflip—if I want to do that, and I can do it because I have the space for it. Other than that, my personality within speaking and singing always stays the same no matter what I’m doing. The only restriction in the past was, as you say, the space to move around.

On the converse of having restrictions, if you had an unlimited budget, a dream venue, and could do whatever you wanted for an hour-long set, what would that look like?

Oh man, I would play arenas all the time where I could hire as many people as I want. I think I would always have people dancing on stage at every moment of the performance—as many people as can fit.

Would you be on a round stage or on a catwalk?

I think I’d probably be on the catwalk. I do like the catwalk. I’d probably have a full band, as many instruments as I want. I love liveliness and the experience of those things. Live shows should be that type of fun. I love the connection of it all between people. I want it to be one big connection.

I read a quote from another interview that you love to make connections, especially with random people. What is the most memorable interaction with a random person you’ve had, either during or after a show?

I was literally talking about this yesterday. When I went to Toronto—I love Toronto, by the way—I was 20 at the time. I couldn’t drink in the US yet, but in Toronto, the drinking age is 19. I went out with this group of about four people. My manager drove us in the tour car to a bar. I got to know these people all night until 2 AM. We were talking, walking around, sitting at the bar, and drinking. They were telling me about their lives and everything, and I genuinely think that was one of the most beautiful nights of my life. I was having so much fun. I don’t even know how to explain it; I just felt so at home. It was just so comfortable and beautiful to me. Then we walked to this little corner store, talked there, and actually took a photo together that I still see sometimes. Then we walked to this park and sat there and talked for a long time until 2 AM when I had to go back to the hotel.

It feels very full circle in the way that you’re achieving what you want to do with the record, both within the music and outside of it. I want to close on a question about musical influence. If you could place this record, Love is the Law, on a vinyl shelf sandwiched between two records of your choice from any era, from anybody, who would they be and why?

That’s actually a really hard question. Oh, man.

You can do a double sandwich too. It can be two on one side, two on another, if that makes it easier.

From a right-now standpoint, it’s even harder because I’m listening to so much older stuff that’s all just legends. I’m going to get chewed up for this, but I think in the sense of the vocal aspect, I would probably do a Prince album—specifically his self-titled one. I’ve been getting so many Prince comments and stuff, which is crazy because when I did start making this, he wasn’t even an influence at all. But voices would just align there; you could pick up both and feel similarities.

And then on the other side, I would probably do Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen. Amazing album. I love that album with my entire heart, and it was a big influence on all the country-esque tones of the stuff on this record.

Listen to Love is the Law out this Friday, July 24 on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Love Spells on Instagram and TikTok.

Hey guys - I’m gonna try really hard not to start each one of these with a thank you because you subscribe to me to read about lit people making lit music. Still, the response on Instagram and Substack from my conversation with E.R last week brought a lot of new faces, so welcome, great to see you. Let’s dive right in.

Our guests this week are, in their own words, the inverse of a wish that nobody asked for but protects us ALL, except maybe Elon Musk or Larry Page, from eternal damnation. There’s no sob story at the root of Born at Midnite’s origin, which is kind of the glaring focal point on the lapel of their brand.

The Montreal-based duo has always been a “singles” collective, releasing quickfire tracks whose production starts with excitement and the pursuit of fun and ends the second this fun starts to feel like a chore. This approach is not for everybody, and the duo is well aware. “We appreciate when musicians take such close care of their music for so long; it’s just not us,” says David Carriere, himself and the other half of BAM and visuals extraordinaire Amery Sandford nodding in agreement. I must note that as we are having this very discussion, David is accompanied by a massive framed Celine Dion poster staring three-fourths over the shoulder, listening in. She is, I’d assume, a music perfectionist, but I feel like she’d honestly really like the post-party funk these guys are sporting.

Sob-story-less and (healthily) negligent as their creative dispositions are, it’s refreshing to see how excited they are about the music that’s come from the project. The new record, Eternal BAM Nation, is eleven (and a half) tracks of pure sub-bass-city entirely self-produced over Chic-Bebe: a luxury baby goods store in Montreal with a grumpy owner who clearly just doesn’t get it.

This was a really, really fun conversation. I hope you check out the music and tune into our convo!

25F: Is that Celine Dion behind you?

David: Yeah.

That is so nice of her to make an appearance.

David: Oh yeah, I can move over a little bit if you want to see her.

I mean, it’s all about you guys, but she looked me right in the eyes. I couldn’t NOT say anything.

David: There is a used CD and cassette store halfway to my house, and they have a bin with about 30 or 40 of this exact poster.

That’s so fire. Anyways…back to you guys. Until very recently, you weren’t entirely an “album group.” You had a lot of single compilations and things like that. How does it feel to have a “real” album out in the world? Does it feel almost slightly too respectable for a group like Born at Midnight?

Amery: Yeah, it feels like “grown-up” energy now.

David: We just finally had the time to do it. But I think that’s a hilarious observation—that maybe we shouldn’t be doing that. It’s like when people make funny little skits online, and then all of a sudden they release a full-length movie that has the same quality as the skits.

Amery: Yeah, so the next thing is a cover album.

David: Yeah, a big Greatest Hits album, then a cover album.

Nice. Are you going to cover Celine Dion?

David: Celine Dion first, of course. It’s her best song by a mile.

Well, you’ll get to make it your best song too.

Amery: I think that would be tough to tackle.

I feel like you could do it.

Amery: I don’t know. I actually just watched an interview with Celine Dion where she said that when she first heard “My Heart Will Go On,” she didn’t really like it. She was trying to get her husband’s attention, like, “No, no more.” She sang it, and they actually ended up using her demo vocal because she just didn’t really care. She thought it was a nice song her friend wrote, but she wasn’t into doing movie songs. And then she just did that one take, and it became what it is. Like, what the fuck?

Obviously, this interview was never going to be entirely about Celine Dion, but it brings up an interesting point. When people listen to this full-length record, they realize you have a real concept here. Do you think you’ll ever get to a point where you have a “YOLO-esque” appeal, where people genuinely love the music beyond any level of irony?

Amery: I think about this idea a lot. I’ve been making music for about ten years, but I still feel like a late bloomer in many ways. I haven’t done a huge tour, and I only put out my first album about two years ago.

During COVID, there was this weird push toward extreme professionalization. Everything you did had to be full-time immediately, like, “Okay, we have to play SXSW.” I talk to younger kids in bands here, and they say, “Oh, we don’t feel like we can play a show before we have music on Spotify.” That is so sad.

With this project, we never had expectations to do anything. We just got an overwhelming response to something we did purely because it was fun. It felt like the most punk rock thing ever. Obviously, Arbutus Records helped us a lot with the backend of putting out music, but having something you truly do just for laughs resonate with people is amazing. It takes the pressure off all the things you are “supposed” to think about when making music. Since the pandemic, people start creative projects and immediately think about monetization. That takes so much joy out of doing things for fun.

I love that, because there is a sort of faux-vanity, self-indulgence to the record. Often, people feel like they need a sob story to make a good album. How liberating has it been to write from the perspective of just doing whatever feels fun? Is that unrestricted process what makes better music for you?

David: It works for us. No disrespect to anyone who is fingerpicking an acoustic guitar and singing in a baby voice about something personal, because that is real to them. But for us, we hang out together. Part of hanging out is taking the piss—either out of ourselves or other people in a veiled way.

If writing dramatic, ironic tearjerkers was in your usual repertoire, what would a Born at Midnight dramatic tearjerker sound like?

Amery: We are rehearsing for the tour right now, and we’re throwing in a song called “Pop Charts.” It feels like a fake song written for a fake movie about a fake heartbreak.

Say more.

Amery: It feels like we took heartbreak—which is a very normal, devastating thing that makes you feel insane—and made an exaggerated version of it that still feels true at the same time. David and I are pretty chill, and we like to write from different perspectives. I watch reality TV where representation of relationships is so warped, like Love Island. Eventually, I realized, “I don’t need to do this.” I put in so much work, and then one day David came in and asked, “What’s going on?” and I was like, “You know what? I don’t need to put in the work. It’s not bringing me anything.”

David: “Pop Charts” is like the Inception version of a pop song. It’s a dream within a dream of a pop song about a love song. If I’m writing real tearjerker music, I have other outlets for that. Born at Midnight doesn’t feel like the place for it. It’s fun to use a turn of phrase that evokes emotion, but in the wrong way.

Amery: I feel like TOPS does that a lot too, like in their song “Chlorine.” There is an indirect, almost evil way of getting to a feeling. It feels emotionally more complex than just saying, “I’m sad.” It evokes a specific environment. A new song on our record that goes there is “I Haven’t Forgotten You.”

David: Directly, it’s about girls talking about getting fucked up at a party.

Amery: Yeah, like moving and getting fucked.

David: No, having friends!

Amery: It’s either awesome or sad, depending on how you look at it.

True. I was gonna ask about your side projects, like TOPS. How does the low-stress playground of Born at Midnight act as a creative avenue or a palate cleanser for your other work?

David: It’s really fun, and it doesn’t need to be a counterbalance; it’s its own thing. I don’t have hobbies except making music and going out to party, so I try to make music all the time. Amery is incredibly fun to make music with because her approach is to go fast and be less precious about things. A lot of collaborators get bogged down in the fine details too early. I’m happy I can do this fully.

How is resisting the urge to over-tweak a song made easier as a duo?

Amery: I have a comically low stamina for making music—usually about three hours, and then I’m like, “Do you want to go to a movie?” Some people can just go into the studio and stay locked in forever, but I can’t. Once a cloud of negativity creeps in, or if we aren’t sharing an idea, that’s when I like to stop. You don’t want to judge yourself before you’ve even made something. It’s so easy to fall into the “this sucks” mindset.

David: We also have limitations built into our process. We start all of our tracks on this 8-track tape machine right here. We record drums and synths in stereo, which means we really only have six tracks left for everything else.

Having that limitation right at the beginning makes it hard to add too much stuff later because the tape tracks feel different in nature. Sometimes I’ve tried to add more freaky elements to the tracks afterward, and Amery will just say, “Nah, that’s bad,” and it’s gone.

Do you think it’s good to have a healthy amount of negligence as a creative? What is your ultimate advice for maintaining that?

Amery: I have a new philosophy: “Do less.” But that doesn’t mean be lazy. Sometimes when you have an idea, you plan too many different facets of it, and it becomes overwhelming. I just try to take it as far as I can, and if I can’t get all the details perfect, I choose to do less. Today, we feel like everything has to be done instantaneously—released, posted on Instagram, aiming for instant virality. My personal approach is to do less, but not to be lazy.

David: Showing up is the hardest part. You shouldn’t be hard on yourself if you show up to work and nothing is coming. It’s easy to just say, “Fuck it, I’m not going to do anything.” Also, the second you think you have a formula figured out, that is exactly when it stops working. It’s the classic “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know shit.” Constantly taking new approaches is key.

A huge part of your project is also the visual aesthetic. Amery, I read an older interview where you talked about your drawing style, referencing Angel’s Egg and Neon Genesis Evangelion. You mentioned you weren’t entirely comfortable drawing in that style. How has not fully knowing how to do something helped you create your unique aesthetic?

Amery: I started illustrating when I moved to Newfoundland, which is a very isolated island in Canada with an amazing punk and art scene. I was a drawer, and people would ask me to make gig posters. I just figured out how to do it as I went.

I think it’s beautiful when you try to imitate something but don’t actually have the technical skill to pull it off. The imitation looks nothing like the original because you aren’t an 80s Japanese animation studio drawing a 20-second still of a girl’s hair. You take one element, and it turns out completely different because of your interpretation and skill level. I love that “broken telephone” quality.

I got lucky with the art because it was always very last minute. I do a lot of Risograph printing, and I’m really into old rave tapes, poster archives, and cassette art books. For this record’s art, I was ripping paper, collaging, and reassembling. It was cool to let go and be excited by the element of surprise. That is exactly how we work in the music studio, too.

David, when Amery presents these visuals to you, does it change how you think about the music or how you play the songs live?

David: It completely represents what I think the entire song is after you see it. Not at first, because you aren’t immediately associating the artwork with the music, but as time goes on, the art becomes the song just as much as the music is.

If there was a cartoon version of you two based on this aesthetic, what would the show be about, and what would the pilot episode look like?

Amery: My forever inspiration is the visual album for Daft Punk’s Discovery. I rewatch that all the time. David and I also just watched Planet Sauvage (Fantastic Planet)—the Daft Punk guys definitely took a lot of inspiration from that. It’s about blue aliens who discover a human baby, treat him like a pet, and it’s very depressing and weird.

In our press releases, David is always writing lore about hilarious punk rock domination through advertising. Our show would be in the style of Josie and the Pussycats. The band is snatched from the Rosemont neighborhood in Montreal and forced to create AI advertisements to endorse an evil king who is in charge of fireworks. David gets brainwashed, but an evil devil smashes my headset, freeing me. I have to rescue David; we solve capitalism, say “fuck capitalism,” and save humanity. That’s the pilot.

We need to get you a screenwriter—that’s a three-episode arc right there. With that “product placement punk” angle, if an uncool brand offered you a billion dollars to sponsor a track, what would be the funniest brand to work with?

David: None of them are funny! If it was something our friends would hate us for, it would be Elon Musk or an oil company since we are both from Alberta. We would obviously never in a billion years do that.

Yeah, they definitely need a lot of help right now. They don’t have anything going for them…

Amery: David, would you do FIFA?

David: Yeah, that would be less bad. It’s controversial and corrupt, but I do love the beautiful game.

I want to go back to the tape machine and the toy-like instruments on the record. What was the weirdest or most toy-like instrument or sample that made it onto the album?

David: We have lots of toys. We have a sampler that we call “The Shoe” because it looks like a big, ugly sneaker.

Are you doing a lot of sampling outside of the software and tools you normally use?

David: Yes. For about a third of the songs, I find drum breaks by passively listening, collecting them on my MPC, and using those as the project’s drums.

We also have this other machine that was marketed as the “MPC killer,” but the logo is terrible, and it only has about three seconds of memory. It really slams the samples. Every function you execute takes about eight seconds to process. It’s from the late 90s, whereas the MPC from the early 90s is a million times faster. It was a giant commercial failure.

So you’re recording samples directly into it?

David: Yeah, you plug a microphone into it and record. You say something, and it ends up on one of the pads. It also has a built-in drum kit called “Old School Hip Hop Kit” that adds vinyl crackle to every sample. I think it’s funny to record vinyl crackle samples onto a tape machine, convert them to digital, and then put them back on a vinyl record later. It’s abstracted four times from its original aesthetic purpose.

Did using those older machines slow down the creation process, or was it a case of, “We have to use this because it’s awesome”?

David: Well, you’re sort of forced to make a song with what you have. It would take much longer if we used a standard drum set, bass, and guitar because there are too many possibilities. When you use something highly specific, it expedites the process.

Which song took the most time to produce, and which took the least?

David: The least was the intro track. It took literally half an hour or less because we already had the idea.

I think “Smash” took the longest because we had to recreate some samples we couldn’t clear the licenses for. We had to reverse-engineer the song after making a fake version of the sample. That happened after the entire record was done, so it felt like months after we had originally made the song. It was a trial.

Tell me about your studio space. I read that it was located above a baby clothing shop. Did the proximity to expensive baby clothes influence the music at all?

Amery: The store was called Chic Bébé. It is in a plaza in Montreal called Saint-Hubert Plaza, which was historically the textiles district. Now it’s this weird purgatory of prom dresses, baby clothes, and baptism wear.

The lady who ran the store was incredibly grumpy—she was unbelievable. I would go in and try to speak French with her to help David out, and she was just so cold. All of her Google reviews said she was cruel. It has this spooky, junky, but charming purgatory vibe to it. It definitely had an influence, even if it was just because it was so hot during the summer that we could only record at night.

We had our last party there on the terrace. There were about a hundred people out on the roof, which structurally probably shouldn’t have happened, but it did. David is just amazing at writing press releases and conjuring up that imagery.

I was going to ask if you were worried that the sub-bass from your parties was shaking the designer cribs downstairs. When you’re making “post-party” music—which I think of as the music for when the lights turn on, rather than when you’re in the thick of it—what is the worst 4 AM snack to eat, and why is it actually the best?

David: Honestly, Amery’s gluten-free crackers with absolutely nothing to dip them in.

Amery: They’re just dry crackers in an apartment with no food. But they’re there, so they’re the best. Either that or a stale croissant.

You’ve warned that this record is going to “pound on those wimpy little ear holes.” What is your official legal disclaimer or safety warning for listeners with exceptionally weak ear holes?

Amery: This doesn’t necessarily answer your question, but I actually had said that word for word in a press release, and our team was like “yeah, we’re using that,” and I was like “oh, alright.”

David: It’s true, we should honestly make stickers with that quote. In general, though, I’d say don’t dig in your ears with Q-tips. It’s bad for your ear-holes. The album won’t be good if you can’t hear it.

Listen to Eternal BAM Nation on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Born at Midnite on Instagram.

Hello hello, lovely people. Welcome back to the corner. I hope everyone had a spectacular Pride Month full of everything colorful, queer, and a little nasty. It feels like a bit of a disservice posting this specific interview on the day Pride has concluded, so, as a reader of TO BE FRANK, I pronounce today as the non-existent June 31st, the unofficial last day of Pride! Because for this specific occasion, it feels entirely appropriate.

Finding success in the acting-to-music pipeline seems to always be notably polarizing. On one hand, you have the powerhouses who find their voices when the cameras fail to do them sufficient justice, and then you have those best left spilling monologues when their pseudo-pop bridges fall flat and underserve. For E.R. FIGHTMASTER, the bridge between the two feels more merged and wholly indistinct.

If you’re one of the kajillion die-hard Grey’s Anatomy fans, no, you’re not seeing things. Before their mononymous transition into the indie-rock world, FIGHTMASTER would become one of the first openly non-binary actors in a television series at this magnitude as Dr. Kai Bartley. Their role would withstand a sort of North-Star status, the first of their kind to break through in this space of entertainment, but as they made clear to me, it was always a business, whereas music has served as a liberation aside from that structured, capital mould.

It was our job as an audience to welcome their presence onto the TV screen; now it’s theirs to relay how playing this role both literally and at a broader scale has shaped not only their ownself-interpretation, but why being this figure is so crucial for a queer audience at large. In their latest musical installation, Tolerance, it’s the discussions of responsibility as a source of empowerment versus stress, delivering a serious message as a comic, and recognizing that while generally grouped among the positive descriptors, “tolerance” is, in fact, a bare minimum that breathes dimension into the record.

E.R. is such a gem, and we had such a fantastic chat about a bit of it all. I hope you’ll check it out. Again, happy Pride spillover day. Love ya.

25F: Where are you calling in from?

FIGHTMASTER: I’m calling in from Florida. I’m visiting my mom, and it’s kind of creepy—everything’s covered in plastic.

It looks like you’re trying to hide fingerprints. Is there a dead body in there or are we good?

It does feel like a murder scene, but really she’s just trying to get a bunch of stuff done, but she also just got hip surgery.

That’s exactly what a murderer would say.

Okay, you’re right. I need to workshop that.

Murder cover-up aside, I think the main reason I’m so excited to talk to you is you’ve mentioned—and I love the way that you said this—that you’re a public figure in a very distinctly queer way. You feel like you have a responsibility to have a clear understanding of yourself. Has making this music that you’re making now allowed you to maybe put down that responsibility, or do you feel like it heightens it?

I think the music prompts more thoughtfulness because I do a lot of comedy too. I think sometimes if I’m doing an interview and it’s through a comedic lens, I can say things that are not very nuanced for a laugh, or to keep momentum, or to make people feel comfortable. Sometimes you end up throwing yourself under the bus in those moments. But I think with songs, you get to craft the message that you’re trying to put out so carefully. Something about it has made me feel really addicted to the craft of the messaging. I don’t really want to say the first thing that comes to my mind just because it’s funny. I really like the fact that I can listen to these songs and think, oh, I could not have said that better. Some of the songs pour out, and they’re ready. And some of them, I take time, and I go through each one of those lines so specifically and intentionally because I feel like I’m trying to model self-reflection.

Do you find that dwelling on these lyrics and having them polished to a T is helpful in the way that you produce your comedy, or do you feel like you have them separated—where comedy is a spur-of-the-moment thing, and music is its own standalone thing? They just work in tandem with each other but not together? Or maybe vice versa.

Great question. I think there’s a cross-training that happens that I can’t get rid of. Like, there’s the song “Tolerance,” and the first line in “Tolerance” is, “I’ve got a high tolerance for pain / I could kill myself and walk it off.” That is actually a line I said to my therapist that made her laugh, and she was like, “I’m sorry, this is so inappropriate, but I feel like you should write that down.”

I think that for me, comedy is this edge I add to my voice when I’m trying to tell you something about myself without it weighing you down. So I think the songs have a certain playfulness because of that, too. Not all of them, but I think the songs that people really move to are all me talking about something kind of hard, but with a lot of playfulness.

Referring to “Tolerance,” the word—I like how you say, especially in the songs but also just in the way the album is described- it’s a positive thing, but it’s a bare minimum. I’m curious: between saying that in therapy versus where you’re at right now, while you’ve toured this for some time and you’ve been able to sit with it, what does tolerance mean to you sitting here now?

It’s really become this word that I’ve just become obsessed with. For example, can I tolerate delivering a serious message about myself without trying to get a laugh? And if I can’t tolerate it, why not? What am I trying to protect? I think that tolerance is a really interesting way to look at the self. Why can’t I tolerate hearing my friend talk about somebody like that? Why can’t I tolerate it when my girlfriends ask me to change? Why can’t you? Sometimes you can’t tolerate something because you’re not meant to, but oftentimes you can’t tolerate something because there is something you’re meant to learn, and you are putting a boundary around yourself to prevent that learning from happening.

I like the language that you’re using. Not only the lyrics in Tolerance, but you’ve got the EPs titled Violence and Bloodshed Baby. It kind of feels like a trilogy in the sense that they’re all combined or growing from one another. It feels like a thematic build from a war footing to an internal truce. Was language specifically in the way that you entitle those records intentional, or was that just something that was right now in the moment?

I do think of them as a trilogy, but I think of them as a trilogy of a really honest adult experience of growth. When I was younger, everything I experienced had a violence to it, including how ravenously I felt about somebody else or how much rage I felt at myself or situations of trauma. All of these things really had this vibe of edge, which is a beautiful, dynamic part of youth. And then I felt really in love with my partner, and Bloodshed, Baby was about dropping violence and really being able to experience grief for the first time.

The longer I’ve been with my partner—it’s been years now—it has created this safe space for me to really get calm and explore. I think in the calm, I have been having conversations with myself about tolerance because I can tolerate so much more because I feel safe. I’m so much happier because of these moments of discomfort I choose, and then the moments of joy I get after the discomfort has passed and I survived it.

The connection between violence and youth is very interesting. With this record especially, there’s lots of reckoning with kid-like heartbreak to ultimately feel a bigger picture. I’m interested to know what your take is on why our adult brains are so bad at protecting us from the things that hurt us when we were our violent and ravenous 10-year-old selves? Why are adult brains so bad at protecting us?

I think that the adult brain understands that it can survive. All the things that we had to do as children to protect ourselves were really skilled; we really couldn’t survive without these incredible strategies of protection. But when you get older, and you’ve survived grief, trauma, rage, death, and all of these things, you have an understanding of your own resilience. So the need for protection is diminished, and your body isn’t always coming up with ways to protect itself anymore. It’s just like, oh, another thing to be resilient about.

You have mentioned how crucial it is to ensure that queer and trans people have elders. Obviously, you’re not at the elder status yet, and I presume eventually you will be as a North Star for many. But when you’re acting in shows like Grey’s Anatomy, and you’re kind of the first actor of your kind, I’m curious how different that is to what part of yourself you found in that closet that you’re making this record in and the studio that maybe the Hollywood cameras didn’t catch?

The acting side is much more of a business. When I’m on a show, I am representing a business. That goes from the smallest show I do to the biggest show I do, and there are people to protect—you want to protect the writers, you want to protect other actors, you want to protect the production company that’s making this film. So you have to be very thoughtful and measured all the time so that you don’t say something that accidentally diminishes the project that you’re in. But with these songs, I’m only responsible to me. I think it just makes me feel so much more free. I can really have conversations about the art with people without worrying that my interpretation of this is maybe bumping with the writer’s interpretation. People ask about Kai all the time, and the truth is, all characters are this combo platter of what was originally written, what you brought to it, and then what the writers saw in that gray area. But when I answer questions about Kai, I still have the writers in my brain. I just don’t feel that way about my songs. I’m like, fucking ask me anything you want to know. That’s a totally different experience.

I also hear you mentioning the term responsibility a lot, and I find that sometimes responsibility can come with negative connotations as well as very positive ones—like being this pinnacle of representation in a space that wasn’t always represented in television. I’m curious what your relationship is with the concept of responsibility, either in TV or in music. Is that something that’s maybe more stress-inducing, or something more empowering, or something that shifts back and forth?

There are parts of my brain that want to say, fuck it, just do you. But I have an internal enforcer that’s also like, hey, this might be the first non-binary person they have on. I think it’s a good balance to have because I want to be myself and I want to be dynamic and charming, and I don’t want to get in my own way with that enforcer. But I also remember that people are really excited about writing off people on the margins. If I am hard to work with, I might have been the first non-binary person they’ve ever actually personally known, and they might not want to work with anyone non-binary again. Our community is that small. So I really am always trying to make sure I’m doing my folks proud. I feel a lot of responsibility for getting to be the one who paved a lot of the way, specifically for network. I really have been one of the first non-binary folks on network TV, and that feeling of making sure that the path was clear behind me because I wasn’t throwing sticks around has never left me.

How has it been touring now? You also do live comedy, and for some of the shows, it could be that you’re filling these rooms with the reputation you have as one of the first non-binary people on television. I’m curious how the instinct to read a room and react in real-time translates from a comedy set to the art that you’re performing at a rock and roll set in front of a couple thousand people.

The thing that comedy and live music share for me is that I have a lot of reps in front of an audience. The experience that I get, no matter what the performance is, is that I make sure that I walk into every room and I fall in love with my audience. So every night—let’s say it’s a really quiet house and my brain goes, I don’t know these assholes, they should have been clapping and cheering louder—I stop and go, you know what? This is one of those sweetie crowds. And sure enough, after the show, someone will say it was their favorite show ever, and I had no reason to be stressed out about their lack of dancing. I just feel really precious about an audience. I want to give them a good time. I want them to walk away feeling really loved up. That is something I don’t get from TV. People always ask what I like better; I like all of it, but the ability to really love somebody up, I can only do from the stage.

And then performing—I mean, you dropped this album at the beginning of June, which I’ve heard is kind of a cool month.

Yeah, people like it. It’s kind of fun.

I hear it’s pretty colorful. But for a lot of corporate spaces also, I feel like June is about celebration as much as it is about marketing, but your record also kind of digs into the messiness, the cracks in the pavement, and all the raw stuff. I’m curious, specifically during Pride Month, do you see putting out something that’s vulnerable as an act of resistance, or as an act of something that is meant to help people rejoice? Or maybe both.

I think that can happen at the same time. I wanted to make an album that I wanted to listen to, and I wanted to make an album that my friends wanted to listen to because all my friends are artists I love, and they’re all queer. When my friends started to text me that they loved the songs, I felt such a glowing wave of accomplishment because I’m adding to the queer canon. And not just adding to the queer canon in a faraway way, but really being like, okay, I’m adding a song to the playlist of one of my favorite artists, who’s also a good friend of mine. That is thrilling to me.

The other thing that I really love about the music stuff is I don’t have a label. I’m not owned by anybody. I am my label. I am self-funded. I do all this shit. This is me. Pride is a protest, and I don’t want to kiss anybody’s fucking ass when I put my music on. I don’t have to explain to any label what this means, and I don’t have to explain to a distributor what the fuck this means. No one can be like, hey, maybe it’s not the time. I get to do it. Pride is a party; it is a protest. Here’s my album. I hope you like it. It’s for you, Queers.

Do you think, based on what you’ve seen with your audiences, whether or not the people who are coming to your shows seem like they’re coming together for music, or if it seems like they’re coming for more of a purpose of sanctuary? A follow-up to that is: do you think a rock show can be both at the same time?

It fucking better be! I’ve seen shows that are so good, but there wasn’t that intense feeling of community, and I didn’t think less of the artist, but she didn’t stick. These shows with the new album have been so much fun because folks are coming to the shows and they are singing along. I usually meet them after the show—I just like to meet them—and if the house is small enough, I’ll go out and talk to folks. A lot of them know that with my shows, they can come there alone and they’ll leave with friends, and those friends will be safe, and they’ll have a nice time. I feel like such a fucking proud dad when that happens. There’s this whole community of queers coming to these shows that have met at these shows, and that is in the top five of my major accomplishments.

For a space and a community as saturated as your crowds are, where you have this beautiful and diverse epicenter, at the same time, there’s such an exhaustion of queer and trans art and community due to the climate, as I’m sure you’re aware. While you have these highs and you get to have all this community, I’m curious: whenever the personal tank feels empty—and I feel like it’s very easy right now for that tank to feel empty—where do you feel like you’re able to fall back to refuel the energy that you get at these shows, maybe aside from the shows?

This is going to sound kind of silly, but I really love animals, and I specifically love birds. I am down here visiting my mom, but the thing that’s really cool about this area is that there’s a bird sanctuary nearby, and the birding thing is just incredible. When I want to recharge, I go out alone, and I bird. Something about birding makes me feel so small in a nice way, where I get to have this incredible gratitude for the intense beauty of this world and remember how silly and fun and delightful my life is. Then I come back, and I want to be with people again.

Is there a bird where you’re like, when I see this through the telescope, that’s the one, we’re so back, let’s fucking go?

I’m sorry to do this to you, but I did see one today. It was a new one for my life list. They say that birds have dialects—regional dialects. I’ve been birding now for about five years, and I’m down here, and I fully heard this crow and was like, what the fuck? That crow has an accent. Then I looked it up, and it was a fish crow, so it was not an American crow. I was like, we are on; we can hear the bird’s accent.

Now I’m going to listen nonstop. I’m going to be like, is this a Robin from Germany? Are we like, this is a German robin? Oh my gosh.

I was looking at a mockingbird today, and I was like, oh, so the southern mockingbirds are petite.

I’m going to start talking in a Southern accent to the crows I see from now on.

It’s so interesting. I just found out that a lot of the females of the species can’t sing; it’s just for the males to communicate extra shit to the females. One of the examples they gave—this was in Time magazine; they did a special thing on it—is that the male mockingbirds will come home to a female mockingbird, and to tell them that they experienced a car alarm that day, they will just make the sound of a car alarm because mockingbirds mimic people noises. I just couldn’t help but empathize so hard with that female, where she’s been sitting on those eggs all day long, and some motherfucker comes home and starts doing a car alarm.

That’s the best turn this interview could have possibly gone.

Birds are crazy, man.

On an end note, I’m curious—what color do you see the record to be? What do you think it would feel like texturally? Is it a daytime record or a nighttime record, and what might it taste or smell like?

For color, I really like the kind of cinnamon-based black on the cover of the album. I think when I listen to these songs, I feel such an intimate warmth that the cinnamon black is the color for me.

Okay. And then what would it feel like texturally if you were to run your hand across it?

I keep wanting to say a cat’s tongue, but in a sweet way.

Is it a daytime or a nighttime record?

It’s a daytime record, I think.

Tell me more.

There’s specifically a song on there that is very nighttime, and that’s “Glide.” But when the album came out, we were out on the road, so we played it while we were driving through the desert and it was broad daylight. It just made me feel as warm and bright as I did the minute that I finished the album. So I’m saying day.

And then what would it taste or smell like?

Well, I don’t know. You know that curve in your partner’s neck, when you come up behind them?

I love it. When people finish the 33 minutes of Tolerance and the final note of “Plan of Attack for Dying” fades out and it’s done and dusted, what is the core feeling that you hope lingers with somebody who has listened to this album for the first time and is rounding it out?

I hope you have this feeling of having a fond memory of a loved one who passed.

Listen to Tolerance on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow FIGHTMASTER on Instagram.

Hello hello! Happy June, happy pride, and I’m so stoked you’re here. We have a handful of new readers after last week, which is so exciting! Very happy to have you on board. We’ve got some good stuff on the horizon, and this interview is no exception. Let’s get right on into it.

If you’ve ever mastered the art of the “diner squint”—staring blankly at a laminate menu while your soul leaves your body to absorb the high-stakes romantic collapse happening in Booth 4, congratulations, you already speak fluent Ill Peach.

A few weeks ago, I caught up with the Minnesota-bred, LA-based trio—Jess Corazza, Pat Morrissey, and Jesse Schuster (plus a delightfully vocal cameo from Jess’s baby daughter)—to dissect the thoughtfully warped, primary-colored universe of their new LP, Eavesdropping. Born of one’s chronic inability to mind one's own business in public eateries, the album takes the mundane trash of daily life and polishes it into cinematic, scenario-driven pop. But let’s not just call it gossip; the record is a masterclass in survival via sonic dissociation, a crucial backdoor out of profound personal grief that allowed Jess to live in other people’s burning houses temporarily.

The only thing more exciting than an eavesdropping session, in my opinion, is the crucial debrief of information collected, which is exactly how this chat felt. I hope you take a read, we had a ton of fun.

25F: When do you feel like Ill Peach became its own universe rather than just a band? Because right now, especially with the visuals, a “cinematic universe” is one way to put it, but I feel like you’ve captured that in the music too. I’d love to hear about that.

Jess: Well, I’m a visual-first person sometimes. I’ll have very trippy, weird visuals just pop into my head. That, along with working with co-collaborators like our best friend Lucy Sandler, really helped dial in the world-building. But I think this album has brought us to a place where, sonically, it feels right for Ill Peach. The visual world is just kind of creating itself based on that. We’re getting really in our bones with who we are as a band, so it just feels like a natural progression.

Pat: Yeah. I mean, I guess the universe started many light-years ago. There’s a lot of backstory because we all went to high school together in Minnesota. We lived a lot of life before Ill Peach. We met there—I don’t exactly remember how—but we were all in an a cappella group together.

What was the a cappella song of choice?

Pat: It was a lot of a cappella Beatles songs. And Jesse played bass...

Jess: Oh, yeah.

Pat: ...and then Jess and I were in the group singing. Jesse and I had a band together, and then we started writing when we were in college. These guys stayed in Minnesota, I went to Connecticut, and then Jess and I moved to New York together and started writing for pop artists as a production/writing duo. Eventually, we all moved to LA around the same time.

The three of us reconnected musically and collaborated on several projects. Jesse was always part of the writing process; he always had a piece of what was to become Ill Peach. In the last couple of years, he officially became the third member. That’s the rough Cliff Notes on how we got here.

In a narrower sense, how would you describe the ill peach universe with this new LP coming out, specifically with this album?

Jesse: I think it’s pretty sweaty. I think it’s a little tongue-in-cheek and very observational from a lyrical place.

Pat: There’s also a little bit of sassiness and cynicism in general. A little spice, but not a mean spice—just generous. That’s really Jess’s voice breaking through. She’s got a little smash, a little spice.

Where did the concept of this whole eavesdropping theme come from?

Jess: Truly, I have the worst habit of eavesdropping.

I feel like it’s human nature, and we’re too afraid to admit it.

Jess: Exactly. It’s this thing where anytime I go out to eat, I realize I have a very soft-spoken voice. If I’m in a loud, crowded space, it’s hard for me to project my voice in conversation, so sometimes I just stay quiet. But then I take on this bad habit of listening to what’s going on around me, to the point where the people at the table with me are like, “Hello? Are you even here with us?”

After our first album, this idea immediately came to me because I was being made fun of for this habit. I was like, “You know what? Fuck it. Why not write a whole album based on it?” We overhear insane things all the time. Every song is based on a little snippet I’ve overheard in real life, just exaggerated into song form.

Pat: If we want to dig one layer deeper, I remember a specific moment where we actually asked each other why we were doing this. When we make music, we usually just throw shit against the wall to see what sticks. That’s always been our process, which is why there’s never really been a cohesive, defined genre—it’s always been a collage of sound.

But I remember one day, Jesse asked, “What does this mean? Why does Jess do this, and why do we find it interesting?” At the time, Jess was going through some really hard shit, and Jesse said, “Maybe it’s because she’s more interested in listening in on other people’s lives than her own right now. It’s a form of dissociation.”

When he said that, it was a total lightbulb moment. I realized that’s why humans do that. It’s why we’re so interested in celebrity culture, gossip, or going to the movies—it’s pure escapism. For a second, you don’t have to think about your own shit. It’s not introspective; you’re just taking outside stories from the table next to you and putting them into the world.

Was that sense of dissociation established before the album was complete, or was it something you discovered halfway through that helped you roll out the rest of the tracks during production?

Jess: I think we chatted about it right in the midst of making the album. I lost my dad during that period of time, so getting through this concept was challenging thing. The album initially started before he passed away, but exactly like Pat and Jesse described, it gave me an outlet to get out of my own grief for a second and just focus on someone else’s story.

Talk to me a bit about “Cult Daddy.” I was reading about its origin—a friend taking a job and realizing all this crazy stuff was happening. Was that something you heard and immediately thought, “Well, obviously we have to make a song and a freaky music video about this”?

Jess: Totally. That one was weird because it wasn’t something I personally overheard. A friend of ours had this experience, and they were the ones eavesdropping on the situation, realizing, “Holy fuck, what did I get myself into?” Without going into too many details to avoid spreading their gossip too far, he told me so many insane things that the phrase “Cult Daddy” just popped into my head. The next day, I told him, “So, I actually wrote this concept based on that insane thing you experienced. What do you think?”

Is that something where the rest of the group hears it and goes, “Well, obviously we have to do that”?

Pat: Yeah, for sure. Jesse already had that baseline that’s in the intro. We had gone to an Airbnb in Joshua Tree, and he had that as a demo. We started with that baseline, and that’s where Jess’s “movie brain” kicked in. You can see the spark in her eyes when she starts visualizing a music video. It happened right away, and she was like, “Oh, this has to be about our friend’s experience with that cult.”

What is it like to sequence an album like this? I’m curious how you find cohesion when the tracks are based on so many different, disconnected experiences. Do you try to sequence it to feel like a continuous story, or is it purely based on what sounds cool in a certain order?

Pat: Sequencing is always hard for me. Jesse loves that process, but I struggle with it. We knew we wanted to start with “Dinner for One,” which is the intro. That actually came together before we wrote a lot of the other songs, and it helped cement the concept. It was the blueprint we built around.

Initially, it was only half a song, and we eventually realized it shouldn’t be a full track—it should be the prelude. We sound-designed it to make it feel like a scene from a movie, and from there, we knew where to take the rest of it.

Jesse: The rest of it was just intuitive. We normally just get in the car, drive around, and try stuff out. When you’re stuck in the space where you make music, you can get overly analytical because you’re working on such a micro level. Sometimes you just need to get out of that space, drive around, and experience the album the way someone else would while they’re popping into the grocery store. How does it feel in that environment? That’s what I remember most about this one.

Jess: Yeah, we love that method. Because it’s a concept album, it really does feel like a movie. You realize, “Oh, if we rearrange this song, it feels like this character is entering the scene, or this plot point is starting to happen.” It felt a lot like editing a film.

Does working within the parameters of a concept album make it easier to create, or does it feel restrictive and challenging?

Jess: It was our first time doing it. Without a concept, it’s a free-for-all, and you can do whatever you want. It was challenging because, as I mentioned, I was grieving. We would start some songs, and I’d have to say, “That’s way too sad. We’ve got to change it because it doesn’t fit the vibe of this album.” We signed up for something bubbly, weird, and quirky, so we had to push through and keep that energy.

Pat: It’s funny because other real-life parameters made their way in subconsciously. When Jess was going through that, she was responding to it constantly. We would get into the studio with a preconceived thought for a song, and she’d immediately say, “Nope, it’s too sad. I can’t do it today.” It reinforced our need to keep the project fun, light, energetic, and quirky. Looking back, those life-experience boundaries definitely shaped the record without us explicitly planning them.

Looking at your entire creative process, is there anything from your very early music days that you’ve kept with you through Ill Peach? On the flip side, is there anything you tried that made you say, “We need to throw that out the window and never do it again”?

Pat: Jesse’s guitar playing is my absolute favorite.

Jess: He’s just modest, you guys.

Pat: It’s funny because he’s a bassist first.

Jesse: Yeah, I’m mostly a bassist. I wouldn’t normally play guitar for other people. It’s usually just a case of, “If you want that specific sound, I’ll sit down and do it, but I can’t shred.”

I mean, that’s a superpower in itself. To be like, “I’m a bassist, but if you want me to play some of the sickest lines you’ve ever heard, I might as well.”

Pat: For me, it goes back to high school. Jesse and I were playing in bands together as early as eighth grade. The music we grew up on was very guitar-focused. I don’t play guitar myself; my comfort zone is producing beats, programming tracks, and working entirely “in the box.” So when we’re making music for Ill Peach, in my mind, I always secretly want Jesse to go back to those high school days and pull from that guitar world. That’s my selfish journey.

Jesse: So selfish! [Laughs]

If this album were a physical place, where would it be?

Jess: A restaurant.

Pat: Yeah, a busy restaurant.

What kind of restaurant?

Pat: I’ve always pictured an old, divey Italian restaurant with checkered tablecloths.

Jess: Yeah, a dirty, diving Italian restaurant. You’ve got weird characters all around you. You have the burnt-out bartender listening to the guy who’s been drinking there for five hours. You have the couple trying to break up, but they’re still touching each other, so they aren’t actually breaking up. It’s just weird vibes all around.

Pat: And the incredibly mundane couple who go there every single Friday and talk about the same shit.

If it were a color palette, what would it be?

Jess: We’ve always said primary colors. Red and yellow.

Jesse: The first imagery that came to mind for me was ketchup and mustard.

Jess: Exactly. I also feel like red is a very powerful color, and it’s been integrated into a lot of our visuals lately.

If you could run your finger across Eavesdropping, what would it feel like, texture-wise?

Jess: Oh, wow. Jesse, do you want this one?

Jesse: I want it to be goopy. Like those middle school Halloween haunted houses where you close your eyes, put your hand in a bowl, and they tell you it’s brains, but it’s really just cold spaghetti noodles. That’s what it is.

What would it smell like?

Pat: I don’t know why, but the absolute first thing that popped into my head—even though it makes no sense—is burnt rubber. It kind of singes your nose hairs a little bit. It’s a very odd smell, but some people secretly like it.

Jess: Or rubber cement! Like the glue people are talking about when they say they’re huffing glue for fun. Whatever that smells like.

If Ill Peach were a room, what would the walls look like, and what pictures would be hanging up?

Pat: I’m trying to picture this for myself now... I can’t even decide.

I was reading a story the other day—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper—where the wallpaper starts talking to the girl until she eventually becomes the wallpaper. That’s what I was thinking of. She’s listening to the wallpaper the same way you guys are listening to the people at this restaurant.

Pat: Oh, like a crime scene! You’ve got the numbered evidence markers and voyeuristic photos of these people.

Jess: And the body outlines on the floor.

Pat: To be literal about it, I was just going to say there are flies everywhere on the walls.

Jess: Oh yeah, we actually have flies all over the album art, so there you go.

For someone listening to Eavesdropping for the very first time, what is the ideal environment or platform for that first listen?

Pat: We’ve been talking about creating an experience where people can actively engage in the act of eavesdropping while listening to the record. We actually set up a telephone number where people can call in to hear snippets of upcoming singles. The ideal environment would be some weird, performance-art listening party vibe that we’ve put together.

Listen to Eavesdropping on Spotify and Apple Music out June 26. Follow Ill Peach on Instagram and TikTok

Well. Thirty? 30? Like three-zero? What a wild number. Five interviews felt like the start of the end of a career, so thirty feels like a bajillion lifetimes. Thank you for reading and supporting. I’m sort of at a loss for words. This installation feels only fitting for a milestone like this.

For the past 3 weeks, I have spent the better part of my days essentially living inside the sonic architecture of Obsession. I’ve created long-winded notes app documents of theories and character head canons, returned to the theater, watched out for new cues I missed the first time, and traced how Rock Burwell’s score does the heavy lifting of turning a screen’s light into a visceral, physiological reaction. This movie has completely hijacked my brain, and there is an inherent absurdity in speaking with the architect of that experience, the person responsible for the very soundscape that has been rattling around my skull. For a milestone of this magnitude, there is no one else I would rather have step into my shop.

Burwell’s trajectory is the kind of industry anomaly that usually only exists in pitch meetings. We’re talking about a transition from bedroom producer to orchestrating a feature-length descent into madness, all through a process that felt more like a late-night collaboration between friends than a formal studio production. He candidly pulls back the curtain on the “run-and-gun” reality of Obsession: how his initial audition track became the film’s backbone, the specific, agonizing decision to pull back on the music to let the silence do the work at the films tail end, and the surreal whiplash of seeing his own name on a collector’s Waxwork treatment for a project that, until recently, was just a few guys working out of a bedroom.

It is a rare thing to catch an artist in the exact moment the tectonic plates of their career shift beneath them. As Burwell navigates the transition from DIY obscurity to being the most sought-after name in the room, he offers a grounded, often disarmingly honest look at the transition from creative intuition to public scrutiny.

What a treat this was...seriously. Such a fun conversation about easily my favorite movie in a long time...and the second biggest in the entire world right now. I hope you take a read.

*WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD!*

25F: I’m really curious to hear what the past three weeks have been like for you. I can hardly imagine how crazy it’s been.

Rock Burwell: Honestly? Too insane to put into words. It’s like a whole new life suddenly—at least for the time being. It seems like the course and trajectory of what I’ve been doing up until now has shifted tenfold.

What are a couple of things that have happened over the past few weeks where you’ve been able to look back and be like, “Oh, okay, this is the real deal”?

The sheer amount of messages and people reaching out. My girlfriend has been amazing; I basically gave her my inbox, and she’s been scheduling and managing my whole life and helping coordinate things like this. Beyond that, I’ve been reached out to by pretty much every film composing agency. I’m having meetings with everyone and having to make a decision on who is going to represent me. It’s the type of stuff you dream of as a musician, but you never expect it to happen so quickly.

How did the whole thing come up in the beginning? How was it pitched to you? I’m assuming you were familiar with Curry’s work already, but were you given a script or a rough cut? Where did this all coincide and begin for you?

It’s a bit of a funny story. I was connected with Curry and Cooper [Tomlinson] in their sketch comedy duo through a couple of mutual friends. My friend Harry and I have worked as music producers for years; we were working with all kinds of clients, and he had a childhood friend working in casting who knew them. They were looking to make a song for a music video. We all worked really well together, and it was fun.

It was during those three or four weeks that he got greenlit for Obsession. He was all excited and asked, “Dude, do you think you could score a feature?” And that was literally it. We hit the ground running. We talked about the premise and what it was supposed to feel like, and I threw some demo ideas out—I kind of auditioned myself for the studio to sign on.

From getting that first draft of the script all the way to the final picture, it was a fluid process. I was making him stuff to play on set and early stuff to edit with, like temp music. It was a DIY, “run-and-gun” process. We live like 5 minutes apart and would be editing and would hop over here saying, “You’ve probably got 15 minutes, let’s dig in.” It was cool.

Was scoring films something you had experience in, or was it a goal of yours when you first started making music? Or was this just a case of, “This is a cool opportunity, I love music, let’s get the ball rolling”?

Totally—both of those things. I had definitely thought about scoring a film at some point, but it’s a mysterious industry to break into. It was always on my radar. I felt like I’d be a natural because I used to love shooting videos—early YouTube stuff on a little point-and-shoot camera. I’ve always loved how visual media and music work together. Growing up, the soundtracks for video games, movies, and shows were always very present to me.

All that said, I didn’t go to film school, and I’d never scored a feature before. I just prepared as much as I could and took it on. It was definitely something I was interested in, but I never knew how it might come to be.

What was your relationship with horror specifically before hopping on a project like this?

Horror is definitely a genre I love. I’m in the camp where I believe any art that makes me feel something is effective. Even if it’s uncomfortable, gross, or gives me anxiety, I respect it. If I can go to a theater and leave feeling “off” or scared, I enjoy that. I grew up in New England, not far from Salem, Massachusetts. We’d drive out to those cemeteries and chase those weird, spooky thrills.

Funny enough—and this is a deep cut—when I started producing full-time, I created an online pseudonym to sell beats to rappers. I took a name from Pulp Fiction and called myself “Rocky Horror.” At the time, I didn’t even know about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s why everyone calls me Rock or Rocky now, even though it’s not my real name. The horror element was always weirdly ingrained. I used to get notes on my beats saying they sounded “spooky,” so I guess it all came full circle.

What was your first impression of Bear and Nikki’s dynamic on the page versus when you actually saw them on screen? Does seeing the rough cut shift how you think it should sound?

I remember loving the script and being totally immersed in it from the get-go. It was actually the first feature script I’d ever read, so it felt like diving into a book I couldn’t put down. It was very visual. I knew right away their dynamic was going to be visceral. By the time I saw Inde and Michael’s performances together in the picture, it exceeded all expectations. They really blew it out of the water in a way that surprised me.

Was there a moment, either in the script or the rough cut, where you knew this would bring out a sense of discomfort that lasts long after the credits?

I don’t know if I quite had the foresight to create something with the purpose of a lasting impact, but ideally, you make something so effective that it sticks. I just tried to execute at the highest level and immerse myself in the specific emotions of the scenes.

When Curry and I talked about the soundtrack early on, we didn’t even know if it would be published or distributed; it was just a dream. The fact that it’s sticking with people is incredible.

Was there a scene in the rough cut without music where you thought, “I know I’m going to make this even crazier”?

There were a handful of those. The standout ones, like the car scene or the big death moments. Interestingly, on some of those where we thought we had to go “big,” we actually ended up pulling back. It was more effective to let the performance sit in the space. Specifically, the restaurant scene—the famous one on socials where Nikki stands up and says, “No, no, no.” We had really big music there originally, but we pulled it back.

Then there were opposite moments, like Bear’s final moments at the end, where the music really takes over and gets very loud. That actually surprised me. Also, a fun side note: the very last song, “Love is in the Air, Pt. 2,” was actually the first thing I ever created for the film. It was my “audition” to show I was the guy for the job. I hadn’t even seen the picture yet, but the timing ended up being almost spot-on with the performance. It felt like it was meant to be.

It must be so cool to have an audition piece become the biggest moment at the end of a global film.

It’s wild to think about now. The whole thing feels like such a perfect storm, but it took lots of shifting moving parts to get to that point.

How different do you feel now compared to the person who first submitted that track? I mean, it has hardly been long since the film came out, but I’m assuming it also hasn’t been long, at least in a movie-making sense, since you had to have the score finished, right?

I’ve been soaking in the psychological side of that. A big part of this was, and still is, dealing with imposter syndrome. I didn’t know it would be this large. Nobody knew it would be this large! But I knew I was working with cool people, and I respected Curry’s work, and regardless of if only three people saw it, I knew it would be good. I did a deep dive into his horror shorts and realized, “This dude has it.”

There were a lot of nerves. Talking to producers and hitting deadlines was all new to me. I kept wondering, “Is this even going to be good?” Even at the first premiere, I didn’t know how the score would be received. It’s helped me build confidence and feel proud of myself. It’s been a transformative, and at times anxiety-inducing, process.

Beyond the film’s success, you’re getting the physical record release from Waxwork. As a composer, what does it feel like to have your debut feature score get that elite, collector’s vinyl treatment?

It’s insane. Absolutely a dream come true. Working with the mastering people and Backlot Music has been such a cool process. Now there’s the vinyl, the CD, and the cassette. I’m a bit of a vinyl collector myself, so seeing my own name on a collector’s item like that is trippy and incredible. I feel so lucky.

Have you been able to sneak into a regular theater to see it with an audience?

I saw it at the TIFF premiere and the LA premiere, and then my girlfriend surprised me with a screening for twenty of our friends. But about a week ago, just the two of us went out wearing our Obsession merch. We were acting like super fans. I’ve seen people online saying they’ve seen it 13 times!

When we went for the first time in theaters, I turned the corner and saw not a single empty seat. I don’t know the last time I saw that—maybe since I was a kid. Hearing the first-time reactions from a theater full of people is an emotional, surreal thing. It’s tough to put into words. Seeing my name in the credits still hasn’t set in. Maybe it will soon, but it’s still not real at the moment.

When you listen back to the score, what might the music smell like? What is the physical texture? And if it were a food or beverage, what would it be?

Oh my god, I haven’t thought of it like that. For smells, it goes from something sweet and floral to something rancid and disgusting. Maybe like your favorite food that is just starting to go bad. Or a cake that is disguised but filled with gross meatloaf on the inside.

I’m surprised you didn’t immediately say “sandwich.”

Well, I was trying to avoid that one. But all due respect to Sandy. Rest in peace.

Which character do you think would have the best and worst taste in music?

Selfishly, I have to say Sarah has the best taste because she’s listening to one of my own band’s songs in the car. When Bear gets in that car scene, there’s a cut of my music playing in the background—so shout out to Sarah.

For the worst? Maybe the “One Wish Willow” guy—I don’t know what the hell he’s listening to. Probably nothing. The Crystal Shop guy is probably just listening to Tibetan singing bowls. But the obvious answer for worst taste is Bear. He doesn’t seem to make any decisions for himself, so he probably just listens to whatever is on the radio.

I think Bear has a lot more to worry about within himself than his lack of music.

Yeah, pretty much.

As you look back at this journey, what are you excited about moving forward, both in film and with your personal music?

This has definitely put me in the spotlight and opened doors. I’m really excited to work on Curry’s next film, which is happening right now. We’ve been texting; I think he has about a third of it edited in his bedroom. I’m about to go on a trip, and when I come back, it’s full speed ahead.

I want to keep exploring film and visual media, but I also still write and release my own music and produce for other artists. This has allowed so many new connections to form. It’s an exciting time of self-discovery. The next few months are going to be very interesting.

Watch Obsession in theaters now. Listen to the score on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Rock Burwell on Instagram and TikTok.

“The Teenagers were huge in 2008” is true both literally and self-proclaimed as an exact lyric in their first single release in over 20 years, “Do you remember,” released late last month. It’s true, though. Following the release of their debut (and sole) record, Reality Check, the group would find themselves a heftier bit more fame than they might have expected, given the group’s kickoff was entirely a joke. It was a “sleaze” of sorts that gave them an addictive quality, pairing deadpan spoken-word delivery with adolescent fantasies that felt like movie synopses set to a synth-pop beat. Then, they stopped.

Fast-forward through a decade of silence, a stint on French gaming YouTube, and a t-shirt business or two, and the boys are back. Well, two of them are. Dorian Dumont and Quentin Delafon have finally dusted off the master tapes, trading in the “fantasized” stories of their twenties for something a bit more personal—though they’re the first to admit they’re still “fucking around a bit.” They aren’t actual teenagers anymore (they weren’t really teenagers then, either), but as Dorian points out, the Arctic Monkeys aren’t monkeys, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers aren’t peppers, so the name persists.

I sat down with Dorian to discuss the “balls” it takes to return after a generation-long hiatus, the awkwardness of missing an ex’s friends, and what it’s like to realize your 2007 cult hits are currently having a second life on Gen Z TikTok. This was a really cool one for me, personally. I hope you give it a read!

Ian: A friend of mine and I are both very big fans. He texted me, “The Teenagers just dropped a song, and you need to get on that right now.” So I’m really excited to be talking with you. What made now feel like the right time to bring The Teenagers back?

Dorian: It wasn’t really that we decided it was the right time. I think it’s just because there are only two of us now—me and Quentin. Quentin had been asking me for a while to do a gig or a song. He was willing to, but I was the one saying, “I think I’m done with it.” So, yeah, to be honest, I think I just missed the attention.

Fair enough. Was there a lot of creating that you guys were doing over those 20 years, or was it more like a break followed by a sudden start?

Yeah, it was more like—we did other stuff aside from music. I did some gaming on YouTube. The other guy was working on some T-shirts. It was really different. We kind of had a big break from music; I didn’t write anything for ten years or something.

What were you playing?

All types of games on a YouTube channel and stuff. In French.

When you started making music again, do you remember what felt the same as when you were creating 20 years ago, and what felt different?

The thing is, we wrote this song [“Do you remember”] in 2012, so it was kind of an old song. In 2011, we tried to record a second album, but I think it wasn’t the right time for us. We were struggling because we had a bit of a fight, and we didn’t have a label anymore. We finished the album, but we were not really happy with it, so we never released it. When we started again last year, we thought, “Oh, it’s a cool song, and we still like it.” It made sense to drop it first; it’s like a new introduction. “Do You Remember” was like an introduction, and now we’re going to put our new stuff out, sort of like chaptered.

What was the writing process like? A lot of your earlier stuff was more storytelling from a character perspective, and now you’re talking about yourself. How does that compare to writing the first album?

Yeah, it’s true. Actually, on the new one, Quentin wrote most of the lyrics, so it would be better to talk to him about it. But when we started the band, it was a bit of a joke. We didn’t have this vision of, “Let’s talk about real stuff.” We were more like, “Okay, it’s a joke, so we’re just going to have some fun and write funny stories.”

I didn’t think it would work like that. Everything was a bit fantasized; it’s not really real. The stories we talked about, we just imagined them. Like, “Oh, it would be funny if she stole the guitar.” But it never happened. It was more like writing an essay or a movie script. There was a distance between us and the songs. Now it’s more personal, but I feel like we’re still not saying everything we feel. It’s still a bit of a show.

How does the time away change your relationship with the project name, The Teenagers?

Well, I had a lot of people make the joke: “The Grown-ups.” I don’t know, I think it’s fine. The Arctic Monkeys are still not monkeys. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are still not peppers. We’re not teenagers anymore, but we were not really teenagers back then, either—we were more like 25. The name indeed sounds a bit dumb, but in a way, it’s kind of awesome.

When people shift the perspective to, “Oh, you were teenagers, now you’re not,” was there any pressure to meet the memory of what people had about the band initially? Or are you just like, “I don’t really give a shit”?

I guess it’s a mix of both. At first, you say, “Yeah, we don’t give a shit,” but then the more you think about releasing it, the more you start thinking about how people are going to respond. But we don’t have a lot of pressure, in the sense that we've already done tons for our career. We have already played big festivals. We had a super huge label, XL—that was a dream to sign with them. So in this sense, I already did what I could dream of in music. It gives less pressure now. I feel like we have the balls to come back years later and drop songs. If people like it, that’s amazing. If they don’t, at least I had the balls to try.

And also, if they don’t like it, you know that you have a record that a lot of people did like, which kinda rocks.

Yeah, maybe in ten years they will start to like the new one. Who knows?

What kind of emotions and feelings are you excited to explore with this record?

I think it’s less “teenage” in the sense that it’s less about the party. We were really into that when we wrote the first record. Our lives were about going out, drinking, and meeting people. Our style of life now is really different. We talk about our experience in life, but not really seriously, because we don’t want to lecture people. We always make jokes to get people to listen. You should not take it too seriously—we’re just fucking around a bit. The next song we have is called “I miss ur friends.” I think it’s a cool subject. It’s a song about when you have an ex, and you’re over them, but you miss their friends. You miss going out with them, but you don’t feel like calling those people because they’re friends with your ex. I feel like everyone can relate to this.

Interesting. I’ve definitely thought about that, but probably not as a whole, conscious thought until just now. Do you guys have a board where you write a bunch of ideas like this up, or does it just pop into your head?

It was Quentin’s idea. I did the instrumental and sent it to him, and he sent me back the song with the lyrics. We didn’t change anything. We got inspired by the instrumental—it’s a bit more melancholic than what we normally do. I don’t recall a song talking about that specific subject before. When you break up, you’re like, “Oh, I liked this girl or this guy, I wish we could still hang out.” It’s a bit awkward.

With the initial album, a lot of the stuff was adolescent fantasy—sex, boredom, reinvention. Is there a similar through-line with this record, or is it just a bunch of concepts that pop into your head?

You know what’s funny is that now when people look at our record, they see it as a concept record, but it shouldn’t be. We didn’t write a concept on a board. We were really young and just went for it. It’s conceptual in the sense that the theme was just our life—us going out and talking about our friends or what we witnessed. Like “Homecoming”—we wanted to have fun with the guys who always brag about fucking someone when it never happened. It’s fun. I like it so much.

I was talking to my friend about this the other day—nobody’s speaking over a beat nowadays. It’s so nice to hear, not just because it’s new, but because it actually sounds good. Am I assuming there’s going to be a lot more of that on the new record?

Yeah, I think we’re singing a bit more now. We had a lot of talking before because we were not confident at all about singing. We had a bit of imposter syndrome because we started as a joke. I was the only one who really tried to make music; the others were not into making music. We thought, “Okay, we’re going to sing the chorus, and then we’re just going to talk because we don’t know how to sing verses.”

What do you feel like you’ve lost creatively by growing up, and on the other side, what do you feel like you’ve gained?

What we lost for sure is the freshness of making your first record—the excitement of the first song you release. We probably missed that on the way. But now I’m better at realizing if something is good or not. I’m quicker to realize if we should drop a song or if it’s really good and we need to do it. Before, I was more like, “We’re going to put these 12 songs on because we only have these 12 songs.” I put everything I knew about music in there—an electronic song, a pop song, a dance song, indie rock. Now I’m better at choosing what I like.

That reflects the first record, too—it was a big whirlwind. Now you’ve got “Do you remember,” and it sounds more calculated. Is there any idea or line from the past that feels more true now than it did back then?

I don’t know about that, but with the new songs, we explore more diverse styles. We have an acoustic song with just guitar and piano, and an electronic song. Because of how we sing, you always recognize it’s us, so we can explore different styles—some more rock, some more pleasant. I don’t know if the next release is going to be an EP or an album yet, but it’s more diverse. I think there are songs for everyone.

Are there plans to play live again?

Yeah, we should be playing live maybe from September or October.

What songs are you excited to play live, either new or old?

To be honest, I’m excited to play “Homecoming” again. It’s been 15 years. I played it seven years ago at a wedding for a friend; everyone knew the words, and it was so fun. But I haven’t played on a real stage for 15 years. It’ll be exciting because we have a lot of young people now listening through TikTok. If we could play “Homecoming” for a room full of kids who have never seen it live, that would be something I would love to do.

My last question: if there’s anything you want to say to people reading this about the new era of music, what do you want them to know ahead of time?

Honestly, I just hope people enjoy the songs. We don’t have a career plan. When I realized we still have fans—and new Gen Z fans—it made me think, “Oh my God, I have to give them songs.” Even if they don’t like it, fuck it, I have to give them something. I don’t know if in 50 years they will prefer Reality Check to this, but let’s give them songs. It’s so cool that we have new fans on TikTok. Kids who are 16 or 18 sending messages... I’m completely amazed. It’s for the new ones. I hope they like it.

It’s a full circle going back to The Teenagers.

Exactly. We’re really lucky to have that. A lot of bands would not have a new generation 20 years later. I’m proud that we skipped a generation, and kids now can still enjoy something we made 20 years ago. That sounds crazy.

Listen to Do you remember and I miss ur friends on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow The Teenagers on Instagram and TikTok

In the hallowed, high-pressure hallways of Cooper Union, Ray Bull was born as a necessary act of rebellion—not against the “man,” but against the sheer density of a visual arts degree. For Aaron Graham and Tucker Elkins, music was the high-concept art world’s secret emergency exit. While their peers were deconstructing the canvas, they were finding solace in the direct, primal “yes/no” of a melody. It was the ultimate creative loophole: a hobby so far removed from their graded assignments that it became the only place they felt truly free to make a mess.

If you’ve spent any time on the neon-lit corners of the internet, you’ve likely seen them performing surgery on the “DNA” of pop or taking two different tracks and making an unspoken, entirely sung thesis for why they are the same. Their viral mashup series wasn’t just a marketing pivot; it was a Trojan horse for a masterclass in songwriting. By distilling chart-toppers down to their bare-minimum skeletons—proving that a Taylor Swift hook can wear a Mazzy Star leather jacket if you style it right—they carved out a “placeless” identity. They are the rare duo that treats genre as a secondary layer, an aesthetic coat of paint applied only after the structural integrity of the “infectious hook” has been tested and cleared.

@raybullraybull#mashup #cover #taylorswift #mazzystar #fadeintoyou

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Now, they are emerging from the studio fog with their full-length LP, Please Stop Laughing, out today. The title itself feels like a nervous joke shared at a funeral—a blend of brutal honesty and surreal humor that defines their trajectory. After months of poking at these tracks on the operating table, they’re finally letting the world in to see if the heart still beats. From folk songs that mutated into 60s soul anthems to a dream tour rider that, if feasible, might demand both the Vegas Sphere and a grocery store rotisserie chicken, Ray Bull is finally hearing the splash at the bottom of the well. The secret is officially out, and thank goodness it is. The guys and I had such a nice conversation, and I hope you stick around to check it out.

25F: Talk to me a bit about your start at Cooper Union. What was it about that specific art school environment that made music feel like a secret, or made you feel guilty about pursuing it compared to the visual work you were studying?

Aaron: For me, it was less guilt and more a combination of slight embarrassment and being consumed by art school. I was excited to be there making art, and it felt like that took up all my time. It solidified music as a personal hobby. It wasn’t like I was tossing and turning, thinking I should be making more music; it just wasn’t a big consideration for me then.

Tucker: It was almost an escape. The art world is so heady and socially dependent on who you are. There is something about music that is direct—you either like it or you don’t, it makes you feel something, or it doesn’t. It became something really easy to wrap my head around. It was the perfect breeding ground to be creative because when you’re too focused on making something with high expectations, like art was for us, it can be less fruitful.

Having a visual arts background and incorporating so much imagery into your music now, how often do you discuss a song's visual world before you’ve finished the melody?

Aaron: That usually happens after. At least for me, I look at the finished thing and ask, “What is this saying? What would fit?”

Tucker: I can’t remember a time when we were making something and already knew the visual for it.

Aaron: It’s hard to tell, though, because we’re constantly making things. We’re finishing songs and making visuals simultaneously, so the start and end points blur.

Tucker: It’s an interesting subject because today you can’t separate music from the persona or the style. I always wonder: if this person had the same music but a completely different image, would it be as successful? That’s basically marketing. You can contextualize an album in a way that makes it more compelling. If you use a certain image or aesthetic, it gives the song a different energy.

It’s almost a shame it has to be that way. Labi Siffre once said he didn’t want anyone to see him or think about him; he just wanted them to hear the music. That’s a pure way to think about it, but it’s totally impossible now. You have to decide what choices will make it more interesting for yourself.

Aside from visuals, what was it like diving into those songs for your mashup series? How did that help you understand the DNA of pop music and teach you how to build a hook?

Tucker: At first, it wasn’t conscious. We saw the video series as a vehicle to get an audience and keep making things. We thought they were a little silly. But doing so many of them infected our DNA in terms of songwriting. We’ve always been a melody-first duo, but those mashups solidified the ethos that a song isn’t complete unless it has an infectious hook. We don’t consider a song “good” now unless it feels on par with the hits we were dissecting.

Were there points where you realized that while this was a marketing vehicle, it was also a legitimate way to study music production?

Aaron: It never felt like that while we were doing it; it was more after the fact. But anytime we did a Taylor Swift song or something in the Top 50, I’d take note.

Tucker: Some combinations felt more “in our lane,” like the Jose Gonzalez and Barenaked Ladies mashup (Heartbeats vs. One Week). Those felt satisfying because they edged into something that wasn’t just “Capital C” Content.

How did that experimental approach to storytelling prepare you for your own three-minute pop songs or the narratives you build on Instagram?

Tucker: Something is interesting about taking something super familiar and recreating it until it becomes familiar again in a new way. It teaches you the “bare minimum” skeleton that gives a song its identity. We try to make infectious hooks because we like that stuff, just like anyone else. We’ll take a polished pop song and distill it to just a bassline and a vocal to see if it still registers. It makes you realize that sometimes heavy production kills the vibe. You could make a Taylor Swift song sound like the Velvet Underground if you wanted.

Aaron: Tucker and I didn’t grow up in bands aspiring to do this as our main career, so we’re “placeless” in a weird way. All genres are just colors on our palette. The mashups reinforced the idea that “style” is just a layer you lay on top of the structure. Beneath that layer, is the song catchy? Is the structure good? That’s what matters.

Does that feeling of placelessness feel isolating, or is it empowering as you release this music?

Aaron: It’s both. Sometimes we doubt ourselves and think, “Imagine if we had just been an alt-country band from the start.” We would know exactly where we were going. But ultimately, our goal is to put out things that are eclectic but consistent. It’s worth trudging through the confusing space we’re making for ourselves.

Some of your reels feature snippets of songs that highlight or evoke specific types of nostalgia. Does any of that nostalgia translate to the new record? Is there a specific sound on Please Stop Laughing that triggers that same unlocked memory?

Tucker: We’ve made stuff that people consider nostalgic, but I feel like when people say “nostalgic” now, they just mean the 90s or 2000s. We don’t actively try to hit that note. A lot of music right now is plugging into that Y2K feeling, but I don’t think our album does that intentionally.

Aaron: You’re also catching us at a funny time. We’ve been finished with the music for three months, and we’re just champing at the bit to get it out. We’ve heard it so many times that we don’t even know what it is anymore. Until people listen to it, we’re in a fog. Knowing that people are listening actually changes the music for us.

Does this period in limbo diminish the excitement? Do you reach a point where you just need to get away from the music?

Tucker: It probably makes it worse! Everything is so purposeful right now. When we’re making the album, the goal is to complete it; when we’re mixing, the metric is “is it good enough?” When I listen to music as a fan, I’m relaxed. When you’re finishing an album, it’s the inverse. You lose context, which is disorienting. The content side is just another arm of that—trying to figure out how to get people to hear it.

Aaron: A part of the song “dies” for you because it’s been on the operating table for so long. It doesn’t “hit” you anymore. Maybe years later, I can listen back and forget the version of myself that made it, but right now, it’s impossible to stay connected in that way. Making content for it feels like taking this thing you’re numb to and trying to “whore it out.” You want to leave it alone, but you owe it to yourself to promote it because that’s the environment we live in.

Was there a specific moment where you realized the record was going to be titled Please Stop Laughing?

Aaron: We’ve been waiting to put out an album for a while. We were doing EPs and building a team, and in the meantime, we were writing constantly. We had a huge number of demos to pick from. Once we decided it was “album time,” we let our intuition pick the songs. Please Stop Laughing was one of the tracks, and it just stuck out as the title. It represents our experience—we approach everything with a sense of humor, but we’re also emotional people. The phrase itself is kind of brutal to say to someone, but also funny. It represents a lot of our sentiments.

Today, as the release nears, what does that title mean to you? It could be a threat, or it could sound desperate.

Tucker: For me, it represents having forgotten what these songs are. It feels like: “Please stop laughing... what?” We don’t really know yet.

Aaron: It will have a new meaning once it’s out. I’m looking forward to seeing what that is.

Which song underwent the most radical change from its initial demo?

Aaron: Maybe Baby Jean. It started out sounding like a John Prine song—a galloping, folk-pluck thing. I was certain that was the vibe. Then Tucker pushed it in a direction that was more soulful and 80s-meets-60s. The identity of the lyrics stayed, but it’s a totally different vehicle now.

Tucker: I’d agree with that. Also, maybe Pain and Missouri, though that’s almost cheating because we never really finished a “version” of it until the final one. It was a demo for so long that I thought it would stay raw, but it turned out to have this Graceland feeling—like there are a lot of people in the room.

Which song are you most excited to play live?

Aaron: I’m really excited for Baby Jean and All That You Are. We finally “unlocked” that one in practice recently when Tucker changed a harmony and a keyboard preset.

Tucker: I think Antifreeze is sounding really cool live.

If you had an unlimited budget for this tour, what would the show look like?

Tucker: Unlimited budget? Justin Bieber is dancing on the side. I’d want people to leave thinking, “What the fuck was that?” I want it to be surrealist and confusing. I’d want it to be impossible for the audience to explain to their friends what they saw.

Aaron: There’d be music, a rotisserie chicken, projections, fog...

Tucker: Everything we’re describing we could actually do for 20 bucks, though.

Aaron: Okay, unlimited budget: fog machines, colored lights, and a rotisserie chicken.

That’s why you book the Sphere.

Aaron: That’s why Ray Bull goes Sphere.

Tucker: We’d move the Sphere with a crane. We’d just be playing our normal set inside the Sphere in Brooklyn.

I’m buying that ticket. Last question: What would the Ray Bull of five years ago be most surprised by in this current era?

Aaron: Probably the fact that a single person is listening to it. Back then, we were making stuff, but nobody was listening. Seeing people incorporate our music into their lives is the simplest thing, but it’s the most surprising.

Tucker: Putting out our first music felt like throwing it down a well where you can’t see the bottom. You didn’t even hear it hit. Now, we’re finally getting some response back, which is cool.

Listen to Please Stop Laughing out now on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Ray Bull on Instagram and TikTok.

Lately, I’ve found that as I read more and more about the production of autobiographical, or otherwise hyper-personal projects, this idea of preserving or otherwise revealing granular details of “the self” is often crutched by a support system of individuals around that artist as a point of grounding. From the perspective of a non-artist, non-public figure like myself, this makes sense to an extent; without a doubt, there is always a clear vision because, well, the artist has lived the tale they are aiming to tell, the setting they look to paint, or the person they wish to recount (or perhaps forget). It’s a fine line to draw, though, between external support and the point at which the people around you begin to dilute or otherwise skew this sacred, real-as-hell story that’s trying to be told.

With his latest, and perhaps most reflective project yet, Axel Flóvent avoids such practice in hopes of achieving that ultra-personal, peeled-back picture of returning home to Iceland, to familiarity, and the DIY nature that put his name on the map to begin with. For his latest project, Fleeing the Shore, Flóvent uses solitude as a superpower rather than an obstacle. It was here that field recordings of the local landscape became a basis of creation, raw synth-folk roots from early projects began shining through, and that sort of “homeward-bound” hopeful cadence began to shine through.

He details the nature of his surroundings in Húsavík, a scenic Northwest Coastal municipality of Iceland, as an atmosphere in which creativity at any capacity begs to be exercised. Describing it as “simply beautiful,” it’s hard to argue not only with a native, but with a quick Google search, you’ll see quaint bundles of buildings bunched together on the long shoreline, which is also alleged to be the whale watching capital of Iceland. It was this quaint quietness that welcomed the solitude, which Flovent adamantly clarifies is different from loneliness which he says feels more like an absence rather than a solution. We had a wonderful conversation detailing the conception of this idea, moving all over the world, and what this project means as a chapter not only in his life, but in his career as well. I hope you take a read, there’s some great stuff here!

25F: I’d love to start by discussing the title of the EP, Fleeing the Shore. It suggests a feeling of motion and perhaps distance. I’m curious what the emotional center of the EP is for you—whether that is fleeing something, moving toward something, or protecting yourself.

Axel Flóvent: It came about from the idea of fleeing anything that is difficult. I like the image of being on the ocean, seeing the shore, and always fleeing it. It’s like when I’m depressed or anxious; I see what I’m supposed to do, but I’m fleeing it as much as I can. That’s the picture I’m painting with that title.

Was there a moment, either during the creation of the EP or before, that made you decide the project needed to feel more bare and isolated than your past records?

I’ve spent a long time working on records and collaborations with high-end producers. I was aiming for perfection and getting albums to a place where I loved them sonically. I became obsessed with the ability to take a shortcut by working with a producer who could do things I wouldn’t be able to do. It slowly became a way of hiding away from what I am able to produce myself.

This was an organic evolution after my last record, which was so bombastic—I mean, it had every idea I wanted to try. It was very electronic and highly produced. I wanted to do the opposite now: to be naked and embrace being imperfect.

You have five EPs and two albums under your belt; what does returning to that DIY process look like today? Is it exactly like the beginning, or are you adding tweaks from your experience?

It’s going back, but with the ability that comes from experience. I’ve been in studios, I’ve collaborated with many people, and it was interesting to return to this process with the knowledge I have now compared to 10 or 14 years ago. Back then, I just did everything I thought would be amazing. Now, I’m making deliberate decisions. When I collaborated with producers, they would finish the project with me. This time, I had to make the right choices and steer the production and sonic direction myself.

Were there any habits you held onto from the very beginning when you first started as a completely independent artist?

I still work on demos in a very similar way. The entire process until I started recording was very similar to what I’d always done. It was interesting to return to that space and say, “Now I’m going to produce it.” The habits have evolved organically, but the writing process has stayed much the same.

Do you create demos with the intention of building a specific project, or do you have a collection of demos that you pick and choose from?

I always have this romantic idea that I could use old demos, and it does happen. “Over One Night” is the oldest song on the record. I wrote it in 2021, the same month I released my Tourist record, during a writing session just to get things out of my system. It stayed in a different collection for years with the intent to finish it later. Sonically, it sounded very different back then, so I had to make it fit the feel of this EP.

I like how reviews are describing your use of solitude and loneliness as something “refreshing” rather than purely sad. Is that something that rings true in your life beyond music, or were you harnessing that specifically for this EP?

It has definitely become that because I don’t see loneliness as a negative thing. Usually, people feel sad for someone lonely, but I love solitude. Of course, I can be my own worst enemy, thinking I can do everything myself. It’s also a coping mechanism because I have a lot of social anxiety. Solitude is the romantic part of it; loneliness is the sadder part. I have a love-hate relationship with it, but at the end of the day, I love working alone. I love being able to create something in this “box” and then put it out there.

Does working in that isolated environment allow you to be more honest—not only with your lyrics but with the production?

I think that happens without me forcing it. I have a good sense of whether something fits together. I am working within my own limitations, so I have to look inward and do what I am capable of doing, but it usually comes out okay.

In past projects where you collaborated, were there parts of that process where you still tried to be alone for a bit to find your own flair?

It was usually quite controlled because I would create a “dummy” version of each song. I did this with all my projects. Those dummy versions became clearer to my vision over the years. That writing and demo phase has always been solitary. I’ve tried co-writing and collaborating early on, but it usually distracts me. My social anxiety gets in the way of expressing my ideas the way I can when I’m by myself. I just never had the courage to finish a project entirely by myself until now.

Tell me about the space you used to create this EP. Where were you working?

Mostly in this room in Húsavík, Iceland. I tried to capture field recordings around this house. It’s a beautiful house that belongs to my girlfriend’s family; her grandparents used to live here. It’s the primary reason we moved here—I was able to have a studio space inside the home. I’ve had a studio outside of my home for the last six years, so it’s been interesting to have it in the house again. Being able to make this record between meals and other household things was very interesting. I love that.

Did the pace of life there help shape the songs, or influence how long you let them breathe before deciding they were finished?

Most of them had some time to breathe. It wasn’t until I confirmed that Philip Weinrobe was going to mix the record that I felt confident it would be taken care of by the best hands possible. Once that was confirmed, it happened quite quickly—only a few months—even though some of the songs were written years ago.

What about Iceland made this EP uniquely itself? Would it have been different if you had recorded it in London or somewhere else?

It’s mostly how I feel when I’m here. When you are not at home, you act differently, and that translates to your recording, writing, and decision-making. I don’t know if I would have had the urge to use field recordings or make the physical space a part of the record if I were in London or even Reykjavík.

To me, and maybe im stretching this, but the whole EP feels like a narration. By the end, it feels like the narrator is arriving somewhere. Did you feel like there was a specific storyline, or was that just how the mood evolved?

I love that. When listeners connect with a record like that, it’s my favorite feeling. I think I do that subconsciously. These songs are not accidentally put together in this order, but I didn’t explicitly think about it as finishing or entering something. This EP feels like an “in-between” phase for me. I want to move toward a less polished version of myself with future projects, and this was the first step in that direction.

Is there music you listened to when you were younger that still shows up in your work today, or that inspired this EP specifically?

What I always come back to—which has followed me since I started—is Bon Iver. I think that’s quite obvious, and I don’t want it not to be obvious. I don’t feel like it’s a bad thing. Some artists want to be more unique and don’t want to be too close to someone else, but my voice will never be Justin Vernon’s. It’s more about the approach. I consume his music with a sense of mystery; I never quite know what I’m listening to. That’s what I’m going for: creating a mystery that the listener can put together themselves. My favorite thing in the world is when listeners create their own story for where an album is going.

Aside from what we’ve discussed, what do you hope people hear or see for the first time when they listen to this EP?

I had a very clear idea when I was creating it, but it’s been a while since we finished. Sometimes I’m afraid that when I’m being honest and painting a vulnerable picture, it might come across as pretentious. I hope people take it as something truly vulnerable, that they can put themselves into the songs and connect on a personal level. Most of all, I want it to feel authentic.

When people listen to this EP years from now, what is something in it that you hope still feels alive?

The space it was recorded in. And my “insecure” moments of deciding things for the production. Since it’s my first production project, it’s funny that I talk about production because it’s almost not produced—it’s just recorded. You can really feel the space in my favorite records, especially when you watch documentaries or interviews about them. I feel like that authenticity isn’t something you can make up.

What are you most excited about regarding playing this record live?

On the record, I became the band and played all the instruments, but I’m going to strip these songs down for the stage. I want to make them feel the same but differently, by myself. I don’t want a bunch of playback; I want to create a sonic world that isn’t just me and an acoustic guitar. I get a taste of it tonight—I’m doing a livestream in a few hours!

Listen to Fleeing the Shore out now on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow Axel Flóvent on Instagram.